Nine-year-old “Skid” Beaumont’s father had a drunken vision that New Orleans would expand into the wetlands ... but it didn’t. So the family are marooned in a soggy no man’s land. For Skid, it’s another thing that sets them apart, like having a black mother and white father. It’s the 1980s and “Moms” is tiring of swamp life. Skid hears she once knew magic, until she got religion. This might explain why big brother “Sketcher” is always drawing and why, when he uses his left hand, broken things get fixed. A wonderfully joyous, eccentric first novel.
Sketcher by Roland Watson-Grant, Alma