Review: ‘Hurricane Girl,’ by Marcy Dermansky; ‘Mother Country,’ by Jacinda Townsend; ‘The Cherry Robbers,’ by Sarai Walker

While both women live in their own versions of precariousness, forced to rely on their bodies for their livelihoods, Townsend’s observations of Americans’ colonialist entitlement abroad is damning. Shannon feels her connection to the African continent — “the motherland, after all,” she says — when she looks at “this small girl who could have come from her own barren body.” But, of course, by stealing Souria’s child, she is enacting yet another harrowing injustice upon the helpless teenager.

If the abduction itself feels less persuasive than it might, the novel’s strength lies in the wrenching fallout: for Shannon, Souria and Yu, the child who joins their fates. The ever-changing hues of motherhood and daughterhood, their gifts and losses for each woman and girl, are brought to life in the author’s precise, sensuous prose. Townsend is most eloquent when writing about Souria’s grief; the despair of her empty arms rendered, unforgettably, in language at once tender and brutal.

Sylvia Wren, the reclusive New Mexico artist who narrates THE CHERRY ROBBERS (420 pp., Harper, $27.99), a riveting, gothic page-turner by Sarai Walker, is harboring a secret that, if revealed, would expose both her real identity and the chilling history she has been hiding from for six decades. When a freelance documentarian starts poking around in her business, fear prompts Sylvia to tell her story, revealing that she is (as the filmmaker suspects) one of the six Chapel sisters, heiresses to a firearm fortune in Connecticut who all mysteriously died in the 1950s — except for one. For the sisters, who grew up isolated in the family’s Victorian mansion, nicknamed “the wedding cake,” the only real means of escape was marriage. “The children in the village made up a rhyme about us,” Sylvia recalls. “The Chapel sisters:/First they get married/then they get buried.”

Walker evocatively captures the tempo, languor and decadence of the ivory tower in which the sisters are trapped, Rapunzel-like, by their privilege and the patriarchy. For the most part, the daughters raise themselves. Their father, “one of the wealthiest men in New England,” is distant, absorbed in his work manufacturing “a product that was a bridge to the other side.” But it is their mother’s emotional absence that the girls feel most keenly: Belinda, tormented by the spirits of her own mother as well as of those killed by Chapel’s guns, screams through the night and records her ghostly visions in a diary. Though they’re dismissed as the ravings of a madwoman in the attic, Belinda’s premonitions of marital doom for her children prove eerily accurate. Only Iris survives, by running away at 20 and reinventing herself as Sylvia; still, she can’t quite escape the past.

Although thrilling, the drama of each sister’s tragedy becomes somewhat familiar over the course of the novel. But Walker creates a dazzling world filled with the scents and colors of flowers that will later become the foundation for Sylvia’s subversive paintings. Just as subversive is the swirl of voices of the women at the story’s center: The Chapel women may be locked away in castles and sanitariums by a series of domineering men, but their unfulfilled longings haunt these pages as powerfully as any family curse.

Aamina Ahmad is the author of “The Return of Faraz Ali.”