Moon over Manifest (review)

Abilene Tucker can't figure out why an infected cut on her leg, which healed up just fine, should have prompted her father to send her off to live in his old hometown—Manifest, Kansas—in the care of "Shady" Howard, a saloon-owner-turned-preacher who took care of him as a boy. A box of letters tucked under a floorboard sheds indirect light on the Manifest townsfolk back in her father's day, and some old local newspaper tattle columns and the stories of "The Hungarian Woman" who runs a fortune-telling business slowly help Abilene to make some sense of how issues in Manifest from 1918 (World War I, the Spanish influenza, Prohibition, labor relations in the coal mining industry) are interwoven with the current issues of 1936, particularly the ongoing Great Depression. But where does Abilene's father, Gideon, fit into all this? The pieces fall into place when Abilene figures out that "Jinx," one of the correspondents of the letters, was actually Gideon in his youth, and she realizes that her father has entrusted her to a community that will embrace and nurture her as lovingly as it once did orphaned Gideon. In this debut novel, Vanderpool creates a fictional town with a fully believable history, populated with characters as notable for their warmth as their eccentricity. Each member of the sprawling cast is so robustly developed that the summary list of characters from 1918 and 1936 provided by the author is hardly needed. Ingeniously plotted and gracefully told, this father/daughter tale will resonate with any reader who's ever wondered whether those old family stories really tell the whole truth.