The Shelf: Melanie Sumner

A cavernous sense of loss permeates The Ghost of Milagro Creek (Algonquin Books, $13.95 paperback), a tragic story of love and heartbreak and consequences set in the barrio of Taos, New Mexico. The title may refer to the incandescent spirit of Ignacia Vigil Romero—a Native American medicine woman (or witch?) who wields power and influence even from the grave—but another ghost haunts the pages of this luminous novel. Author Melanie Sumner, a native of Rome, Georgia, was living with her husband, David Marr, in the spectacular painted desert of Taos when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Within two years, he was gone. “Somehow the landscape I was writing about became imbued with his reckless and noble spirit,” Sumner says from her home in Rome, where she lives now with her two children. Sumner’s prose is a soulful tribute not only to her late husband, but also to the colorful cultures that define the contemporary American West. Her multigenerational story is captivating from the first page, and her gift for observation flourishes in the desert heat. “She wore high heels that could shave off a man’s ear, and she looked like she wanted to,” Sumner writes of Rocky, a mysterious girl capable of inspiring suicide (or murder) among blood brothers Mister and Tomas. “Silence surrounded her like a coming storm.” Through police reports, eyewitness accounts, and caseworker interviews, Sumner constructs a tragedy as she crafts an indelible portrait of a community in quiet crisis.

Linguistics I am white, white, white, and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish when I began writing this book. In Rome, I befriended a tree cutter from Belize who calls himself Jaguar Chenko. One summer, Jaguar let me follow him around with my notebook. He’d scramble up a tree with a machete in his teeth (okay, in his belt) and hack away, with the cell phone on his ear. I’d say, “How do you say, ‘She was hot’?”

Common Threads Just as there’s always a Southerner in my story, no matter where it’s set, there’s always a matriarch. There’s something about the way a woman of a certain age tells a story—I can lean back into it.

Setting I have this strange need to miss a place before I can write about it. My longing for New Mexico inspired The Ghost of Milagro Creek. My next novel is set in Alaska, where I lived for two years in the late nineties.

Southern Roots We have a past we can’t get away from. We tell stories. We love the music of the English language and tolerate ambiguity, perhaps even court it. We’re like rich people who have been very poor, or poor people who have been very rich. I do consider myself a Southern writer, but I’ll end up in New Mexico.

The Transition from Wife to Widow Soul mate. Soul mate gone.

Ravens by George Dawes Green
(Grand Central Publishing, $13.99 paperback)
This intensely enjoyable novel of psychological terror by onetime Brunswick resident George Dawes Green (The Juror) made lots of best-of lists when it was released last year. Now available in paperback, it deserves an even wider audience. In Green’s brilliant tale, a Georgia family wins a $318 million lottery and is taken hostage by two con men intent on squeezing the family for half the jackpot.

Hot Shot by Gary Ruffin
(The Overlook Press, $24.95)
Longtime Atlantan Gary Ruffin, a guitarist and songwriter for the 1970s rock band Smoke Rise, riffs on comic mystery in this debut novel set in a small town in Florida. Ruffin’s music career ended after a 2001 operation to remove a brain tumor left him disabled. Now a published novelist, he says he is “happy to be working, and completely inspired.”

Obesity: The Biography by Sander L. Gilman
(Oxford University Press, $24.95)
In the eighteenth century, obesity was a problem of the affluent, but nowadays it is the poorer classes—without benefit of personal trainers and Whole Foods—who are more likely to be overweight. Sander L. Gilman, a professor at Emory University, looks at the long history of obesity and society’s ever-changing attitude toward the body.

Photograph by Soo Keith