Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng

Eight-year-old Robert Chatham has lost everything--friends, family, home--to the fast waters of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. He lights out across the country, a refugee seeking shelter with (and from) a Homer-esque cast of misfits, hucksters, and ne’er-do-wells: the ladies of a “hotel” of ill repute; a piano player whose talent for the blues matches his seemingly supernatural powers of healing; a close-knit clan of trappers, living in a swampland itself marked for flood behind the wall of a WPA dam. Wherever he finds himself, Robert is gripped and propelled by his fear of a devil closing in behind him. The book’s lineage is clear--the ghosts of O’Connor and Faulkner stalk these pages--but pigeonholing Bill Cheng’s remarkable debut as a Southern Gothic shortchanges the power and originality of its language, the artfulness of its voice. Cheng has written a Bildungsroman of the South, a tale of a country submerged again and again--literally and otherwise--under the high tides of the 20th century.