The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustain

If you were to write a novel set in a location you loved as a kid, where would it be?  The scenery from our childhoods can strengthen us or haunt us.  In Kelly Mustain’s The Girls in the Stilt House, most of the story takes place in the Natchez Trace area of Mississippi.  Mustain grew up in Natchez, Mississippi, and the swampland around it is full of creatures and stories.  There is beauty and danger in both.  The story takes place during the tumultuous 1920s.  The Natchez Trace is a character in the book all itself with it being the mother of the stilt house in the swamp.  Ada, a young white girl lives in the stilt house owned by her drunk and abusive bootlegging father.  He’s a horrible person!  He’s the reason Matilda, a teenage African American girl who is the daughter of a black sharecropper finds Ada.  Matilda’s father is a bootlegger too.  Lucky for Ada and Matilda, they can help each other in different ways.  They wind up with the stilt house which is transformed from a hideous place of gloom to a loving sanctuary for Ada, Matilda, and Ada’s baby Anise.  They rise out of the swamp to try to have a better future.  Of course, bigoted, horrible people like a character named Frank are cruel just for the fun of it.  I really enjoyed the strength of Matilda and how Ada saw Matilda as the type of person she wanted to be.  I had heard this book was similar to Where the Crawdads Sing, but I thought it was more like The Great Alone, just set in 1920s Mississippi.  Overall a great story.  If you listen to the audiobook, the narrator speaks really slow to try to give the southern dialect.  Since I’m from Arkansas, I found the dialect to be off and annoying unless I listened at 1.25x speed.  Once I sped up the narration it was enjoyable.