“Spring, 1923. Ada smelled the swamp before she reached it. The mingling of sulfur and rot worked with memory to knot her stomach and burn the back of her throat. She was returning with little more than she had taken with her a year before.”
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and those are the opening lines to the first chapter of Kelly Mustian’s debut novel The Girls in the Stilt House. The story takes place in Natchez, Mississippi, over the course of a year.
Seventeen year old Ada ran away to Baton Rouge with a musician. But now, a year later he ends their relationship and she is forced to go home to the stilt house in the swamp and her abusive father.
Eighteen year old Matilda is the daughter of a sharecropper who struggles to care for both her newborn baby sister and her father, sick with influenza. She sets aside her dream to escape to the North - at first to care for them and then to hide from a man she witnessed commit a murder.
Ada discovers she is pregnant and when her father dies, Matilda offers to help her in exchange for a place to live. This is a story about two strong young women surviving in a tough place during a tough time in history.
Mustian, who grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, says in her author’s note, “In writing this book, I wanted to use the landscape, both physical and cultural, of 1920’s Mississippi to convey something universal - the contrast between beauty and brutality inherent in our world, and sometimes in ourselves.”
If you’re looking for a well written book about two courageous young women, then you must read The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian.
