Cicada Summer

McKeen (Tear) delivers a moving tale of grief and the power of storytelling. Husha and her partner, Nellie, shelter in place during the Covid lockdown with Husha’s ailing grandfather, Arthur, at his remote cabin in Ontario. That summer, a swarm of cicadas emerge, and the sound of the insects adds to Husha’s turmoil as she grieves the recent death of her mother, who left behind an unpublished story collection. Interspersed with Husha’s narrative are her mother’s fantastical tales, including one about a woman on a deep-sea expedition who discovers a fish whose body is covered in eyeballs. The woman is mourning her daughter, and she starts morphing into the fish, growing eyes that allow her to see her dead child. In another story, a hole opens in the earth, threatening to swallow an entire family and their cottage. As Husha and the others read her mother’s stories aloud, she’s profoundly moved, and McKeen traces the contours of her quiet and sensitive nature in lyrical prose (“Husha doesn’t choose her name, but nevertheless she is silence, or at least a bidding to; she is stillness, immobility, blunt exhaustion contorting beyond its limits and procuring a quality of meditation”). The result is a fine addition to the growing body of pandemic fiction. (June)