The Salt in Our Blood by Ava Morgyn (review)

When seventeen-year-old Cat's grandmother dies, the only person Cat can turn to is Mary, her flighty, bipolar mother, who's been out of her life for the past ten years. Moving into her mother's New Orleans apartment exacerbates the disturbing dreams Cat's been having, and she starts seeing figures from her mother's tarot deck. With help from cute café waiter Daniel, Cat begins probing into her mother's troubled past to try to understand her and make sense of her own disrupted life. Though Daniel's family brushes up against the mystical-POC-helps-white-protagonist trope, they're so thoughtfully drawn (and multiracial) that it wouldn't be fair to reduce them to a stereotype. Polished prose conjures vivid pictures of the fantastical French Quarter and Cat's psychological landscape, and Morgyn handles difficult topics skillfully, landing somewhere between Laurie Halse Anderson and Brenna Yovanoff on a realism-to-supernatural trauma scale. Revelations that Cat's beloved grandmother was psychologically abusive toward Mary and that Mary was raped as a teen upend Cat's understanding of her family's traumatic history; understandably resentful at first of her absent mother, Cat comes to see her as a complex person whose bipolar disease is a part of her life but not its totality. Morgyn carefully avoids romanticizing or mysticizing mental illness, balancing on a fine line between magical realism and traumatized characters making sense of the world as best they can. An author's note addresses Morgyn's own experiences with depression and suicidal ideation and provides National Suicide Prevention Lifeline contact information.