Betty

Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Betty is a brutal coming of age tale, the tale of a girl with a Cherokee father, a white mother, and a family with enough skeletons in its closet to populate a decent sized cemetery. Will Betty make it out of Breathed, Ohio, alive?

As Goodreaders may know, I was a tremendous fan of The Summer That Melted Everything, Tiffany McDaniel's debut novel, and did what I could to help get the word out. When this one was ready to go, I was all in.

While The Summer That Melted Everything was published first, Betty was actually written first, making it the most powerful first novel I've ever read. The fact that parts of it are based on Tiffany's mother's life make it even more powerful.

Much like TSTME, is a work packed with lyrical prose and gutshot plot twists. Much like the protagonists in a Flannery O'Connor book, the Carpenters are doomed from page one and the rest of us get to experience their fates like a forgotten dog dragged behind a station wagon.

After drifting for a while, Landon Carpenter and his brood settle down in a house with a checkered past, a past that is spotless compared to some of the things in the Carpenters' past and also in their future. Landon steers the family between the icebergs as best he can. Betty has the misfortune of growing up in rural Ohio as half Cherokee, dealing with the other girls as well as her family.

That's about all I want to say about the plot for fear of spoilage. There were at least five times where I had to set the book down in order to process some horror that befell Betty or her family. As my friend Easy E said, this is the best modern horror novel in years, even though it isn't marketed as such. Nightmare clowns and giant spiders pale compared to the very real horrors whispered about behind closed doors.

Betty is a brutal coming of age novel that made me physically worn out, a shotgun blast of a novel. Five out of five stars.

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