The floating girls: a novel

"In Bledsoe, Georgia during a sticky summer in the mid-2000s, twelve-year-old Kay Whitaker stumbles on a stilt house in the midst of a neighboring swamp, and upon Andy, a boy about her age. Andy and his father Nile Webber have recently moved back to Georgia from California, and rumors about Nile's wife's death have chased them there and back. Andy-tall, unschooled, and living in poverty with Nile-fascinates and enamors Kay. Kay is willful and loud-mouthed and doesn't listen when her father tells her to stay away from the Webbers. But when Kay's emotionally compromised half-mute sister goes missing, the mystery of Nile's wife's death-and her parents' potential role in it-comes to light, and Kay, Andy, and her brothers must navigate the layers of secrets that emerge in the course of the investigation. The Floating Girls is wonderfully atmospheric Southern fiction, a novel that will appeal to readers of The Girls in the Stilt House, Where the Crawdads Sing, and This Tender Land"--