Young God: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2014: Katherine Faw Morris's voice is terse and vicious, and in her debut Young God, she shows that she can strong arm the reader with few words. Thirteen-year-old Nikki has spent her life in the Carolina hills, a bleak world of drugs, prostitution, and murder. Morris borrows the grit and violence of modern Southern Gothic authors, like Ron Rash or Daniel Woodrell, but her own strengths come from a sense of restraint. Each of Young God's short chapters captures a single breathless moment. Miles Davis famously said, "It's not the notes you play; it's the notes you don't play." With the text Morris spares--in the whitespace of her novel--lay the most terrifying revelations. It turns out the most resonant words of Young God are the ones alluded to, never spoken. --Kevin Nguyen