The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish [Paperback]

*2018Los Angeles TimesBook Prize Finalist
*Longlisted?for The Crooks Corner Book Prize?
*Longlisted for the 2019 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
*A Best Book of 2018Kirkus Reviews,BuzzFeed News,Entropy,LitReactor,LitHub
*35 Over 35 Award2018
*One of the Most Anticipated Books of the FallVulture,Harper's BAZAAR,BuzzFeed News,Publishers Weekly,The Millions,Bustle,Fast Company

Its 16-year-old Edie who finds their mother Marianne dangling in the living room from an old jump rope, puddle of urine on the floor, barely alive. Upstairs, 14-year-old Mae had fallen into one of her trances, often a result of feeling too closely attuned to her mothers dark moods. After Marianne is unwillingly admitted to a mental hospital, Edie and Mae are forced to move from their childhood home in Louisiana to New York to live with their estranged father, Dennis, a former civil rights activist and literary figure on the other side of success.

The girls, grieving and homesick, are at first wary of their fathers affection, but soon Mae and Edies close relationship begins to fall apartEdie remains fiercely loyal to Marianne, convinced that Dennis is responsible for her mothers downfall, while Mae, suffocated by her striking resemblances to her mother, feels pulled toward their father. The girls move in increasingly opposing and destructive directions as they struggle to cope with outsized pain, and as the history of Dennis and Mariannes romantic past clicks into focus, the family fractures further.

Moving through a selection of first-person accounts and written with a sinister sense of humor,The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fishpowerfully captures the quiet torment of two sisters craving the attention of a parent they cant, and shouldnt, have to lS,