The River Knows Your Name: A Novel

"The setup, the questions, and the characters are immediately engrossing, and the story never falters.”

“Woods crowded the road on either side, opening briefly for a field or pasture, then closing up again. Vines choked the limbs of trees that stood in tangles of wild brush. Clusters of purple wildflowers . . . hung their drenched heads in the late August heat.”

In Depression-wracked Mississippi, two young women with small daughters travel those backroads as they struggle to make ends meet. They stay, maybe for a couple of months, maybe a few years, in dying towns and the “wrong side” of Natchez. One sings in a nightclub; the other accidentally ends up living upstairs from a brothel.

The River Knows Your Name unspools in alternating and compelling narratives told by one of those women, Becca, from 1932 to 1934 and by the daughter of the other, Nell, in 1971, as their stories inevitably connect. (There’s also a brief section from the viewpoint of the second woman, Nell's mother Hazel.)

Becca flees her home with her six-month-old daughter Evie after her husband dies riding the rails in search of work and her control-freak mother-in-law tries to take over her life. Among other things, the mother-in-law surreptitiously has Becca’s mail forwarded to her own address and decorates a fairy-tale bedroom in her house where she wants Becca and Evie to live. Running out of money, Becca and Evie go first to Rodney—“almost a ghost town”—and then to Natchez.

Meanwhile, Nell has been haunted for years by quick hits of memories, like the “boxy green truck parked in front of the house” and the man “in a dark coat and a hat pulled low climbing the front steps with a small child.”

But Hazel firmly refuses to talk about the past. Then Nell finds a strange photo: her mother, wearing the kind of elegant cocktail dress and pearl earrings that Nell has never seen in her possession, sitting at a table with a man whose arm is around her. The back of the photo simply says: “1934, The Twilight Room.”

Armed with that clue and not much else, Nell takes a job house-sitting in rural Mississippi while she scours old city directories and church rosters and hunts down anyone who might have known Hazel back when.

The setup, the questions, and the characters are immediately engrossing, and the story never falters. Kelly Mustian—author of the bestselling debut novel The Girls in the Stilt House—plants subtle small clues throughout that repeatedly pay off. While the ending might be predictable, the plot twists en route are not what a reader would expect.

Layered within the two narratives is another strand, the theme of loss. In addition to the obvious loss of a child, there’s a subtler—probably too understated—theme about loss of dreams. As Hazel says, “You don’t give up on a dream all at once. First you pare it down. . . . Work it in around everything else.”

The writing is often vivid and loving as it describes locales that are rarely seen in fiction. The Mississippi River, “choppy, irascible under a steel-gray sky.” Becca’s first view of the ghost town Rodney: “Simple houses and other wooden or old-brick structures were scattered about, some almost entirely claimed by vines, some whose walls had already been taken down by the woods.”

The problem with this book’s structure—two narrators, each constantly going to new places and meeting new people—is that there are too many quirky, usually well-meaning characters to keep track of. Was it Estelle or Iris or Arlene or Rose who worked at The Twilight Room? And if Drew is the good-hearted neighbor, then who is Gus?

Luckily, most of these people are interesting in their own right, and the confusion doesn’t slow down the plot or dim the pain of the characters' losses.