cover image The Messenger of Magnolia Street

The Messenger of Magnolia Street

River Jordan, . . Harper San Francisco, $22.95 (248pp) ISBN 978-0-06-084176-8

Jordan's Southern gothic debut transports readers to Shibboleth, Ala., a sleepy anytown of "cornbread and ladybugs"—and miracles of divine intervention—that is being sucked dry by a mysterious, sinister force. An omniscient, grandiloquent narrator called the Recorder tells the story of three childhood friends who are steered by God to redeem their town. The novel's protagonist and the town's beloved son, Nehemiah Trust, left Shibboleth for Washington, D.C., 12 years earlier for a career on Capitol Hill, but like his biblical namesake, he is "destined to save his city and his people." Nehemiah's childhood friend (and new romantic interest), Trice, is a woman gifted with eerily prescient visions, and along with Nehemiah's older brother Billy, heads to D.C. to fetch him home. "Something is trying to steal Shibboleth," she warns, perturbed by the town's curiously dry wells and a premonition of an empty future. Back home, time and the laws of nature bend as the past folds into the present, and the smell of sulfur increasingly suffuses the novel as the supernatural and spiritual battle heats up. Readers eager for an apocalyptic story about "the presence of evil and the power of good" may embrace this novel. (Jan.)