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LUCKY TURTLE

by Bill Roorbach ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 26, 2022

An epic love story and love letter to the West. No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere.

A teenage girl sent to reform school in deepest Montana meets the love of her life the day she arrives—the school's van driver.

"The driver was my age, maybe a little older, slender, huge cowboy hat and cowboy boots and cowboy buckle. He wore a long black braid tied with rawhide and thicker rawhide bands around his wiry biceps....He smelled like some distant burning, I can hardly explain it, studied my eyes whenever I was required to cooperate, didn’t put his hands on me, didn’t ask any questions, didn’t offer any greetings, not a word from his mouth." Look out: Roorbach has created the sexiest man seen in literature in a good long time. This is Lucky Turtle, who, as 16-year-old Cindra Zoeller is about to learn, just keeps getting better the more you know him; his wilderness survival skills—which will come seriously into play—verge on the supernatural. What's more, the very next time they're alone together, taking the camp laundry into town, he reveals that his clairvoyant aunt has foreseen that she will be his wife. Fans of Roorbach's work—most recently The Girl of the Lake (2017)—have been waiting five years for this book and will not be disappointed. Again, the man has cooked up a completely captivating world, just a touch more magical and interesting than the real one. This time, it's a place called Turtle Butte, where a disgraced television actress has turned her attention to reforming misguided female youth at a facility called Camp Challenge. It's a slowly unfolding, complicated, suspenseful plot; it's safe to say that Cindra will not be reformed. There's no lane-staying for White guy Roorbach: His teenage-girl narrator is flawless; Chinese, Haitian, and Native characters are beautifully done. (Many sensitivity readers are thanked in the acknowledgments.) Lucky Turtle has his woodland lore and Native rituals; Cindra has her copy of Hawaii , which they read aloud from every night: "Michener was strong medicine."

Pub Date: April 26, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-64375-097-2

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Bill Roorbach

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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BOOK TO SCREEN

LONG ISLAND

by Colm Tóibín ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2024

A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.

An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.

At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.

Pub Date: May 7, 2024

ISBN: 9781476785110

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Colm Tóibín

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Book review: ‘Lucky Turtle’ tells a sweeping coming-of-age tale of romance – and heartbreak

A teenage girl, and her older self, narrate Bill Roorbach's latest novel, which tackles big themes of abuse, racism and love.

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Early on in Bill Roorbach’s novel “Lucky Turtle,” narrator and protagonist Cindra Zoeller takes the reader through the circumstances in which she found herself in 1997. For her role in an as-yet-unspecified crime, Cindra – 16 as the novel opens – is offered the opportunity to forego the prison system for a camp in Montana. Roorbach makes it clear that we’re getting this filtered through the perception of an older Cintra, one who is aware of the systemic inequalities in the system that’s more lenient to her – blonde and white – than it is to her co-defendants, who are of Puerto Rican descent.

Soon enough, Cindra arrives at Camp Challenge, a space run by a former child star and populated by an array of characters ranging from amicable to hostile to outright abusive. The story of a young woman from New England sent thousands of miles away to find herself would have been sufficient for a detailed and compelling novel on its own, but that isn’t really what Maine resident Roorbach is after here.

Local review

“Lucky Turtle” By Bill Roorbach Algonquin Books, $27.95

Some of that comes from the contrast from young Cindra and the decades-older version of her who’s recounting this story. But Roorbach also lets elements of Cindra’s post-Camp Challenge life into the narrative, including a reference relatively early on that turns out to foreshadow plenty of subsequent developments. “Much later I had a therapist who said I liked the boundaries Camp Challenge provided,” Cindra muses. “All I’d said was that I’d liked wearing all gray.”

Prospective readers interested in heading into this novel cold might want to stop here; one of “Lucky Turtle’s” many charms is the way that Roorbach turns a relatively straightforward coming-of-age narrative into something more temporally complex. In other words, venturing into this novel without really knowing where this was going had its charms.

That said, that allusion to a therapist isn’t the last glimpse we get of Cindra’s adult life, and about a third of the way through the novel, Roorbach changes up the structure, juxtaposing Cindra’s growing romance with Lucky, a young man who works for the camp, with her life decades later, as she finds herself living an unfulfilled life in the suburbs with Walter, a controlling man who couldn’t be further removed from Lucky.

Roorbach follows Cindra from there in two different timelines. Her situation at Camp Challenge quickly becomes unsustainable for her. While there are genuinely caring people there among both her peers and the camp’s staff, there is also one particular figure whose abuse of his power – and whose literal abuse, period – is revealed in a chilling manner. Cindra and Lucky find themselves in love and on the lam, eventually creating their own small household with a few others who join them in isolation. Advertisement

From the flash-forwards, we know that this won’t last. But the question of what, exactly, happened hovers above the proceedings, heightening the tension as to when Lucky and Cindra’s idyll will end. (There’s also an ongoing question of how Walter figures into all of this.) And seeing exactly how these seemingly disparate elements come together – which they do – is another of the pleasures that comes from the reading this novel. It’s not the only one, however; there’s also a joy that can come from lyrical passages like this, in which Cindra watches Lucky hunt a deer:

“But I felt the little deer tense, tensed myself, some feral corner in me, and then, with no further warning, the thud of impact. The animal collapsed to her front knees, then to one side, the spear holding her half upright as — beautiful creature built from mountains and valleys and brooks and wildflower meadows and sky — she became wind.”

There are also a few knowing nods from Roorbach that feel a little meta – including when one character argues that James Michener’s “Hawaii,” which Cindra is reading when she lives with Lucky, is irredeemably flawed and that “we should stick to our own stories.” Given that Lucky’s own background is one of the running threads in the novel – Cindra first believes that he’s Crow, but his family history proves more complicated than that – Roorbach seems to have his own opinions on the subject. (Notably, several sensitivity readers are credited in the book’s acknowledgements.)

“Lucky Turtle” is an expansive and empathic novel, one which spans large portions of the country and grapples with substantial issues. (The pandemic and racist militias also play a part.) At times, it can feel over-saturated; Cindra and Lucky are both deeply felt characters, while a few of the supporting characters are more ambiguously drawn. But in the end, Roorbach has written a moving novel that comes about that quality organically, and uses it to explore grand themes along the way.

New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of three books: “Political Sign,” “Reel” and “Transitory.” He has reviewed books for the New York Times, Bookforum, the Star Tribune and elsewhere.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, lucky turtle.

LUCKY TURTLE, Bill Roorbach’s latest novel, is a new kind of romance. Dark, dangerous, and threaded with beauty and possibility, it’s the story of the whirlwind affair of two young lovers and the decades they were kept apart.

Sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller and Lucky Turtle, who is just a handful of years older, meet at Camp Challenge, a rehabilitation facility for delinquent or criminal girls in Montana. The attraction is immediate, perhaps destined, but both are locked in greater struggles. Faced with family dysfunction, past crimes, and immature yet passionate desires, and against a backdrop of racism and land conflicts, they find themselves living rough in the gorgeous wilds of Montana.

"The tensions don’t simmer here but roil, making for an emotionally challenging, worthwhile and truly special read."

Cindra, tough but incredibly vulnerable, is raised by a rage-filled mother and kindhearted father when she participates in an armed robbery with her adult boyfriend. He is sentenced to 20 years, and after some negotiation between her lawyer, family, and local school and church officials, Cindra is remanded to Camp Challenge until she is 19. Arriving in Elk City, Montana, she is escorted to the Camp (run by frightening former child star Dora Dryden Conover) by the silent and handsome Lucky. Rumor around the camp is that Lucky is deaf, but Cindra assumes him to be a stoic and mysterious Crow hero.

Before hardly any time has passed at Camp Challenge, Cindra is befriended by an imaginative and lonely girl, sexually abused by the camp doctor, locked away in a horrific solitary confinement, and told by Lucky that “my aunt Maria said you will be my wife…. She knows most things.” Confident in his aunt’s prophecy, Lucky breaks Cindra out of her confinement in the Vault, and they run for the Montana wilderness that Lucky knows well.

Aided by Maria and her husband, Clay, Cindra and Lucky enjoy a natural idyll for weeks as the search for them goes on. Hunting and foraging for food and planning a future garden, they live in a small dirt-floor shack, swim in streams and watch the stars move in the night sky. At one point, Clay visits them with supplies and brings Francie, Cindra’s friend from camp, who has recently escaped.

Readers (and Cindra) know that their Eden cannot last. Winter weather is coming, Francie has caught the eye of an unpredictable militiaman, and Cindra is pregnant. The trio are also joined by Lucky’s best friend, the jovial Swede Aarto Johman, and now they are two couples. Plans for the cold days ahead and for welcoming the baby turn to plans for evading Dale Drinkins, the dastardly man with a lust for Francie and a hatred for Lucky.

Of course, Cindra and Lucky are ripped apart, and much of the book is Cindra reaching back over 20-plus years for memories of her brief but seminal time with Lucky.

Roorbach has penned a love letter to the beauty and power of Montana, but he contrasts it with the greed and avarice of those who have tried to tame it, and oppress or eradicate its indigenous people. The characters in LUCKY TURTLE can be understood as symbols for that conflict, but it is a delight to read them just as Roorbach pens them. His style is lovely and lyrical, with interesting turns of phrase and keen observations. The tensions don’t simmer here but roil, making for an emotionally challenging, worthwhile and truly special read.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on May 6, 2022

Lucky Turtle by Bill Roorbach

• Publication Date: May 2, 2023
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• ISBN-10: 1643753908
• ISBN-13: 9781643753904

Lucky Turtle

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Lucky Turtle

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By Bill Roorbach

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This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around May 2, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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• Cultural Heritage
• “An unforgettable love story.” People
• “Fans of Roorbach’s prolific work will appreciate his signature lyricism and sense of place, his sweeping narrative, humor and romance. New readers are walking into the hands of a skilled storyteller who’s not afraid to take on a big, messy tale of love, privilege and abuse.” New York Times Book Review
• “Nobody else could have written this gorgeous novel, full to the brim with tragedy but also fun, as well as the best kind of romance —embracing so much more than the couple at its center. Cindra is an impeccably loyal and honest narrator, our perfect guide through the wilds of Montana. Lucky Turtle is an ode and a love letter to our wounded, imperfect, and oh-so-beautiful world.” Nina de Gramont, author of The Christie Affair
• “No one writes about love or the American wilderness like Bill Roorbach. A thrilling, blistering tale of young love and old hate and the steady endurance of both.” Lily King, author of Five Tuesdays in Winter
• “Look out: Roorbach has created the sexiest man seen in literature in a good long time . . . An epic love story . . . No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere.” Kirkus Reviews, starred review
• ​“Roorbach is a consummate raconteur skilled in breathing life into his characters. His prose is well-suited to the Montana landscape, capacious yet created with poetic economy, evoking the splendor of nature in language that sparkles like crystal clear mountain water . . . Roorbach’s understated, luminescent novel beautifully evokes an idyllic world created when two hearts are braided together.” Booklist, starred review
• “An engrossing novel with standout characters.” Library Journal, starred review
• “Two great love affairs—one between characters, the other with the wilds of Montana as its original inhabitants knew it—surge through this engaging, audacious novel. Every page hums with life and energy.” Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal and Archangel
• “At once an adventure, a love story, and a profound meditation on the grandeur of the natural world, Lucky Turtle is a novel so full of beauty and heart and pathos that you won’t want it to end, a book that hums with grace, and sings with passion. Roorbach is a national treasure.” Jonathan Evison, author of Small World
• “Roorbach delivers a most electric pulse into the hardscrabble dirt and veins in this novel's memorable backdrop of ancient Montana mountains and waters. Lucky Turtle gives us a world where adventure and landscape combine tenderly for a most unforgettable read.” Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders
• “A story of love and heartbreak in a world of breathtaking splendor and deep injustice, Bill Roorbach's Lucky Turtle is a novel of perseverance, brimming with entertaining dialogue and rich details of the flora and fauna of the West.” Shelf Awareness
• “A new kind of romance… [and] a love letter to the beauty and power of Montana… The tensions don’t simmer here but roil, making for an emotionally challenging, worthwhile and truly special read.” BookReporter
• “An unforgettable love story set starkly against Montana Wilderness.” Largehearted Boy, starred review

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Bill Roorbach

About the author.

Bill Roorbach is the author of ten books, including the Montana Award-winning Lucky Turtle, The Girl of the Lake , the Kirkus Prize finalist The Remedy for Love , the bestselling Life Among Giants , and the Flannery O’Connor Award–winning collection Big Bend . Roorbach has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His craft book, Writing Life Stories , has been in print for over twenty-five years. His writing has appeared in Harper’s , the New York Times Magazine , the Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Granta, Ecotone, New York magazine, The American Scholar , and other publications. He lives in Maine with his family.

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LUCKY TURTLE

“An epic love story . . . No greater reading pleasure to be had anywhere.” — Kirkus Reviews , starred review

When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law,

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When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law, living off their resounding love, Lucky’s vast knowledge of the wilderness, and a little help from some friends.

But they can run from the outside world for only so long, and the consequences of their naïve fantasy of a future together—and circumstances shaped by skin color—will keep them apart for decades. Cindra gets trapped in a relationship, safely if stultifyingly suburban, where she is both cosseted and controlled by a man who claims to be her rescuer. But for Cindra, there will never be another Lucky, and she dreams of one day finding him, the only man she’s ever fully trusted, her soulmate.

Page-turning, full of vivid characters, delicious suspense, and ultimately joy,  Lucky Turtle  is a big- hearted, deeply engrossing love story from one of our most entertaining and perceptive writers.

• Algonquin Books
• 9781643750972

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“Nobody else could have written this gorgeous novel, full to the brim with tragedy but also fun, as well as the best kind of romance —embracing so much more than the couple at its center. Cindra is an impeccably loyal and honest narrator, our perfect guide through the wilds of Montana.  Lucky Turtle is an ode and a love letter to our wounded, imperfect, and oh-so-beautiful world.” — Nina de Gramont, author of  The Christie Affair

“No one writes about love or the American wilderness like Bill Roorbach. A thrilling, blistering tale of young love and old hate and the steady endurance of both.” — Lily King, author of  Five Tuesdays in Winter

​“Roorbach is a consummate raconteur skilled in breathing life into his characters. His prose is well-suited to the Montana landscape, capacious yet created with poetic economy, evoking the splendor of nature in language that sparkles like crystal clear mountain water . . . Roorbach’s understated, luminescent novel beautifully evokes an idyllic world created when two hearts are braided together.” — Booklist , starred review

“Two great love affairs—one between characters, the other with the wilds of Montana as its original inhabitants knew it—surge through this engaging, audacious novel. Every page hums with life and energy.” — Andrea Barrett, author of  The Voyage of the Narwhal  and  Archangel

“At once an adventure, a love story, and a profound meditation on the grandeur of the natural world,  Lucky Turtle is a novel so full of beauty and heart and pathos that you won’t want it to end, a book that hums with grace, and sings with passion. Roorbach is a national treasure.” — Jonathan Evison, author of  Small World  

Bill Roorbach, author of  Lucky Turtle , is looking for the best book club in America. Probably yours! Bill is available for free virtual author visits for reading groups. To arrange a session with your book club, bookstore, or library, please contact [email protected] .

1. Life is a series of choices, and we hope to make good ones. But what of a world with few choices, or only bad ones? What are Cindra’s true choices, and, by contrast, what circumstances are pressed upon her by fate or family? What are Lucky’s true choices?

2. We’re getting the story of Lucky and Cindra through Cindra’s eyes. How clearly does she see the story? How clearly does she see herself? In what ways are we readers able to see Cindra through the eyes of others, to understand things she may not?

3. How does the present story affect our reading of the past story? And how does the past story affect our reading of the present? How does your view of Cindra shift during the course of the novel? Your view of Lucky?

4. What are Clay Marvelette’s reasons for being so helpful to the young runaways? In what ways does he fail them, and in what ways is he their savior?

5. Maria is Lucky’s aunt by tradition, and he fully accepts her as such. What is their actual relationship? What other roles does Maria play in Lucky’s life?

6. How is Montana a kind of character in Lucky Turtle ? Turtle Butte? The wilderness? Does the setting of San Francisco work in the same way, or is there something different about its role? What are the most important roles nature plays in the novel?

7. Far Turtle, Lucky’s grandfather, lives a complicated life. How do his trials and travels and beliefs redound on Lucky’s life, and on the story?

8. Cindra early in life rejects her suburban identity, only to be haunted by it. How would she escape the confines of privilege? In what ways is that possible—or impossible—for Cindra or for anyone who grows up as she does?

9. Lucky’s background is a puzzle that Cindra slowly unravels. From clues and discoveries and revelations in the book, explain that background.

10. Dora Dryden Conover is a complicated soul. What is her role in Lucky’s development? What are her motivations both at camp and in the world? How does she see Cindra?

11. Francie and Cindra become very close. What is their initial attraction? What are the ties that gradually bind them together? Is this a friendship that can last, or is it based on extreme circumstances?

12. Discuss the role that each character’s race plays in the story.

13. The ancient Greeks thought the world could be divided into four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. How do those elements function in Lucky Turtle ?

14. Non-human animals are a constant presence in the novel. Do animals have souls? Do they make choices? How do they fit into Lucky’s and Cindra’s lives? How do they affect the story?

15. The American story is a mélange of myth and fact, opinion and history, progress and reaction. How does Lucky’s story reflect the predominant American story? In what ways does it reject it? Is there more than one American story?

Lucky Turtle

Bill roorbach. algonquin, $27.95 (416p) isbn 978-1-64375-097-2.

Reviewed on: 02/14/2022

Genre: Fiction

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By Gregory Brown

• May 27, 2022

Born to teenage parents in 1975, Ruby Valentine is adopted as an infant by an older couple, Alice and Mel, and raised in western Canada. But in the poet Lisa Bird-Wilson’s engaging debut novel, PROBABLY RUBY (272 pp., Hogarth, $27) , having white adoptive parents saves this spirited, half-Métis protagonist from nothing. When the alcoholic Mel leaves the family for good, 14-year-old Ruby calls social services to see about being “un-adopted,” to no avail. “It isn’t good here,” she struggles to articulate, in a powerful indictment of Canada’s child welfare programs, which separated Native children from Native households for generations.

A blend of sweet and self-destructive escapades unfolds across 14 self-contained chapters that jump in time between 1950 and 2018. (A few of these have been previously published as stand-alone stories.) In 1992, teenage Ruby and her boyfriend, Bart, run away together, breaking into his aunt’s lakefront cabin. Drunk and high on acid, they get into an argument after which Ruby wanders off and falls asleep. Meanwhile, Bart takes a canoe out on the lake and never returns. Ruby awakens from her stupor to one more loss in her life, the end of what may be Ruby’s most loving romantic relationship punching readers right in the gut, leaving us wondering how she’ll ever recover.

Later, Ruby’s part-Native first husband, Moe, maneuvers her into a polyamorous triangle with his ex, and then gaslights her into thinking her unhappiness is just a sign of unenlightenment. Ruby finds it impossible to leave him, her “big Métis hope” and the father of her two sons, as he’s “tied to all the things she missed and wished for.” Attempting to manufacture an Indigenous identity for her children, Ruby fills their home with Native art, cheap prints and portraits of random people she says are cousins, aunties, uncles, moshoms and kohkums .

If Bird-Wilson’s fragmented structure and prose can at times feel stiff, Ruby never disappoints with her big heart and outrageous sense of humor — and her resilient search for her own history. In the end, she finds a fleeting and imperfect version of the family she’s been searching for, and the reader can’t help wondering what her childhood could have been like.

When Becky Manawatu’s debut, AUĒ (326 pp., Scribe, paper, $16.99), opens, 17-year-old Taukiri has just left his 8-year-old brother, Ārama, at their aunt and uncle’s New Zealand farm. Shaken by the deaths of his adoptive parents — Ārama’s birth parents — in an accident he survived, Taukiri turns his car stereo up and drives off without looking back, telling himself his brother will be better off without him. Taukiri is unwittingly perpetuating a generational pattern of abandonment; his own birth mother, Jade, “deserted” him and went into hiding when he was a child.

Manawatu excels at enriching her characters and story lines with heartbreaking detail. With his older brother gone, Ārama finds a box of bandages and applies them to different parts of his body until all the hurt goes away, just like his Mum used to. Later, when a letter arrives from Taukiri, Ārama’s abusive Uncle Stu sets it on fire and then races off on his four-wheeler. Ārama lies in bed and puts four bandages over his mouth and two more over his eyes to hold “the tears right in.” When Stu returns, Ārama uses the rest of the bandages on his ears so he can’t hear the thumping, or the sound of his Aunty Kat crying.

“Auē” is the Maori word for a howling cry, and this layered work weaves a striking tapestry of fierce love and unflinching violence worthy of its poetic title. At the farm, Ārama pines for his brother’s return and finds safety in a charming friendship with Beth, the hilariously outspoken, spitfire daughter of a kind neighbor. Meanwhile, Taukiri takes the ferry to New Zealand’s North Island, supposedly searching for Jade. He drifts through jam sessions and busking gigs, using music, pills, booze and sex to combat his guilt. A third perspective tracks Jade and Taukiri’s birth father, Toko, a generation earlier as they try to escape a tragic web of gang violence.

These losses can get a bit muddy, and the book’s plotting veers dangerously close to melodrama in its chaotic final act, but Manawatu recovers with a moving finish to this devastating, beautifully written tale imbued with Maori culture and language.

After committing an act of vandalism with her boyfriend in her suburban Massachusetts hometown, Cindra Zoeller, the blond, 16-year-old narrator of Bill Roorbach’s LUCKY TURTLE (407 pp. Algonquin. $27.95), is sent away to Camp Challenge, a Christian youth rehabilitation program located atop Turtle Butte in Montana’s Crow Nation. (Her boyfriend, who is older and Puerto Rican, is sentenced to 20 years in prison.) While the camp advertises “a brand-new start for girls,” it mostly devours them — upon arriving, Cindra quickly encounters a culture of systemic racism and sexual assault.

The camp’s not all monsters, though. The director, a former child actor, seems to genuinely care for her charges; and the girls form small, witty and sustaining family units. Then there’s Lucky, a 20-something driver for the camp who wears “a long black braid tied with rawhide” and whom Cindra and the other girls assume to be Crow. Bearing a scar on his torso from when he was shot as a child, the stoic Lucky barely speaks and exudes an innocence that is mostly believable. Cindra is attracted to Lucky’s outsiderness: Raised by a Crow woman he calls his “Hawk mother,” he is actually part Taishanese and part white, though we learn this only belatedly. Lucky helps Cindra escape, and the two flee into the beautifully rendered Montana wilderness, seeking a romantic utopia that we know can’t last. Roorbach reminds us that the relationship is consensual, even instigated by Cindra, but given their relative ages and backgrounds and Lucky’s employment at the camp, it still flirts with the problematic on both sides.

Roorbach draws a compelling portrait of Cindra and the other wayward teenagers — both too tough and too vulnerable for their own good. But Cindra’s constant attention to skin color (one girl is “white as paper,” another “burned mahogany” and Lucky is “brown as bark”) threatens to undermine this otherwise authentic treatment of racial and cultural conflict in America. Still, fans of Roorbach’s prolific work will appreciate his signature lyricism and sense of place, his sweeping narrative, humor and romance. New readers are walking into the hands of a skilled storyteller who’s not afraid to take on a big, messy tale of love, privilege and abuse.

Gregory Brown is the author of the novel “The Lowering Days.”

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Lucky Turtle Audio CD – Unabridged, April 26, 2022

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• Language English
• Publisher Algonquin Books
• Publication date April 26, 2022
• Dimensions 5.35 x 0.63 x 6.69 inches
• ISBN-13 979-8200881086
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Product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09KMWXXJ5
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Algonquin Books; Unabridged edition (April 26, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8200881086
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.35 x 0.63 x 6.69 inches
• #16,801 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
• #22,827 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Books)
• #86,452 in Books on CD

About the author

Bill roorbach.

Bill Roorbach is the author of ten books, including the Montana Award-winning Lucky Turtle, The Girl of the Lake, the Kirkus Prize finalist The Remedy for Love, the bestselling Life Among Giants, and the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection Big Bend. Roorbach has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His craft book, Writing Life Stories, has been in print for over twenty-five years. His writing has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Granta, Ecotone, New York magazine, The American Scholar, and other publications. He lives in Maine with his family.

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Lucky Turtle

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