And She Was

Brandy "was thirty-one, the daughter of a bum and a slut, saddled with a liquor name." It's with these dubious credentials that our heroine finds herself—yet again—drifting after a man. This time she follows her latest boyfriend, Thad, a tenderhearted fisherman she keeps at emotional arm's length, to remote Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands. Brandy finds a gig as a cocktail waitress at the local roughneck bar, the Elbow Room, where brawls are the evening's entertainment and fishermen drink with Aleut women, including Bessie, a coke whore, and Little Liz, a hostile drunk. Between drinking, drugging and deciphering mysterious graffiti on the bathroom walls, Brandy delves into the past of the native Aleuts, who were brutally decimated by the Russians in the 18th century. She stumbles upon their mythology and hidden powers—Bessie and Little Liz, for example, are more than what they seem. Dyson expertly interlaces Brandy's story, set in 1986, with the vibrant history of the Aleuts, hundreds of years earlier. While relishing the smart prose, bawdy humor and '80s references, readers will find themselves rooting for the hard-as-nails blonde as she wrestles her demons and begins to redirect her fate. Dyson delivers an original and provocative first novel. Agent, Marly Rusoff . (Nov.)