That Pinson Girl

Wilson’s contrived debut novel (after the collection Crosscurrents) follows the tribulations of a 16-year-old single mother in rural northern Mississippi. It’s 1918 when Leona Pinson gives birth to her son, Isaiah, with help from her aunt Sally, whose dwarfism makes Leona worry Isaiah will end up the same way. Leona’s mother, meanwhile, does little more than curse the “bastard” child. Her volatile older brother, Raymond, who hasn’t been the same since the suspicious death of their father years earlier, vows to force the father to marry Leona, but she won’t reveal his identity. A parallel narrative identifies the father as Walker Broom, who’s off fighting in WWI. He worries he won’t survive the Western Front and thinks often of Leona, wondering why she doesn’t write him (she would if she knew how to reach him). Wilson eventually brings their stories together through the influenza pandemic—Walker convalesces from the virus at a Long Island hospital upon his return, while the lonely Sally contracts it from a friendly clown she meets at a traveling circus—but the prose is riddled with clichés (“You could melt butter with that voice,” a Yankee nurse tells Walker; another character is “struck” by cold weather “like a blow” before he’s made “cold to the bone.” Readers have plenty of better historical fiction options to choose from. (Feb.)