The Salt God’s Daughter by Ilie Ruby — 352 pgs

Growing up in the 1970s, Ruthie and Dolly are almost feral children. Housed in the back of a station wagon with their compulsive mother, Diana, the two girls often go hungry and are skilled at picking through garbage and debris to salvage for their weekly stop at the pawn shop. Diana is a woman ruled by the moon, and spends her time plotting where she and her girls will land by the pages of The Farmer’s Almanac. Often too drunk to fully be aware of her girls’ safety, both Ruthie and Dolly are in harm’s way more often than not. But when Diana dies, leaving the girls to live at the Bethesda Home for Girls, they come to womanhood nearly as wild and unfettered as before their mother’s death. Many years later, when Ruth arrives at the same beachfront motel that the family once harbored at, she realizes that it has become a place where folks come to be lost and found. Taking a role as a caregiver there with her mother’s friend Ms. B, Ruth falls in love with a man who comes and goes like the tide. He can make her forget the past and yearn for the future, but in the end he is always wandering. After many years of his back and forth progressions, Ruth gives birth to Nadia, a child for whom the sea sings in her blood and who is prone to frightening visions. Naida is also no stranger to being different and must always defend herself from vicious bullies who live to torment her. It’s in this tale of three generations of diffident and headstrong women that Ilie Ruby weaves a tale full of Scottish sea lore and mystic Jewish traditions. As each woman in the family comes to see, things are not always as they appear in the moonlight.

One could argue that this book was in fact very moving on many levels. On one hand it’s a story that captures the intense bonds between women, and particularly the mother-child bond. From the very beginning, the author captures the magical awareness and protectiveness of this bond, but she also highlights what could go wrong with a mother who isn’t capable of raising her children with the basic foundation of safety, emotional or otherwise. Diana didn’t seem like the greatest role model for her girls, and she often left them confused and angered at her tumultuous migrations and regular displays of drunkenness. Yet the girls loved her, and when Ruth becomes a mother herself, she vows to do differently for her daughter, creating a soft place for her to land and giving her the stability and emotional openness that she never got as a child.

On the second level, this book unfolds as a dramatic tale of myth and legend, opening up the story to several different interpretations, themes, and varied symbolism. In these bits, scattered throughout the story with a careful hand, the author lures the reader in and builds suspense around the legends of the selkies, the mythical Scottish beings that appear as seals and shed their skin to walk on the land. It’s here that the family drama becomes tightly enmeshed in magic and magical realism. This interplay gives the book a slight fantasy bent and makes the final chapter from the point of a displaced Diana all the more powerful and significant.

The third element branching off from this tale is the story of Nadia and the bullying that disrupts her life. Born slightly disfigured, she suffers from the cruel blows of name calling early on, but later this early teasing morphs into something more dark and terrifying. Nadia is a child with a special gift, but these gifts have burrowed deep inside her subconscious, and she is agonized  to be so different from everyone else. The story within her is one of tempestuousness and unity with the force of the sea that she feels tied to. Her delicate situation leads her to her feeling very misunderstood and to taking chances that would be better avoided. She has a choice to make, and at such a young and vulnerable age, she is stoic and suffering.

While I really liked the book’s deeper magical realism bent and thought that all the elements of the story worked in unity with one another, I also felt that this was a rather dark and tragic tale. It unfolds slowly, like a flower opening to the sunlight, but when the full tale was exposed, it was impossible to miss what had been hinted at all along. The greater depths of the mystic elements turned this book from a forgettable one to one that I am still pondering over, and may be for a long time. An excellent read. Recommended.

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This book was provided as a complimentary review copy.