Young God

The protagonist of Morris’s slim debut novel, told in short fragments and set in the hills of rural North Carolina, is the barely adolescent Nikki, whose mother dies within the first few pages of the book. To avoid being taken by child services, Nikki infiltrates her father’s trailer, hell-bent on reviving, and eventually taking over, the family business: in this young girl’s world, times are tough and drugs provide the only means for making a lucrative living. As a budding dealer of 13, Nikki has yet to suffer the inevitable wear and tear of the job: bad skin, meth mouth, and the effects of fast food and cheap beer. The setup is promising, but all the characters remain two-dimensional, uncaring and unaffected. Nikki witnesses her mother’s death, as well as a grisly murder soon after, but is unconvincingly stoic. Morris has kept her heroine at arm’s length, and therefore she, and the book as a whole, devolves into a slick romanticism of poverty, youth, and violence. (May)