Thank you to NetGalley and Mercer University Press for the opportunity to read Sing Down the Moon by Robert Gwaltney, a beautiful story that hits every single right spot for anyone who loves Southern literature. This has perfect touches of Gothic and magic and the most gorgeous lyrical descriptions.

Sing Down the Moon by Robert Gwaltney is an intentionally disorienting that asks the reader to surrender to uncertainty. The story follows sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye, who longs to escape Good Hope, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia, and the cursed inheritance that binds her to it. For generations, the women in her family have tended Damascus, an ancient fig tree whose song lures the dead across the river. The figs it bears are used to create Redemption, an addictive drug that tethers the living to the dead and slowly consumes the Skye women from the inside out.

Leontyne’s mother is already disappearing, losing pieces of herself to memory and decay, and Leontyne is unraveling too after the accident known as Tribulation Day. She wakes with no memory of who she was before, missing her hand and surrounded by people who refuse to tell her the truth about what happened. Because the protagonist knows so little, the reader does too, and the story unfolds through fragments, withheld information, and shifting loyalties. Each chapter feels like receiving breadcrumbs rather than answers, slowly guiding you toward an understanding of the island, its magic, and the cost of survival.

The prose is ephemeral and poetic, with language that feels almost otherworldly. Gwaltney’s writing is strikingly unique, but that lyricism also adds to the difficulty of following the narrative. There is sometimes little clarity in what you are reading, and the sense of confusion feels purposeful, mirroring Leontyne’s fractured memory and the unstable world she inhabits.

This is not a book that holds your hand. It demands patience, trust, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity. For readers who enjoy experimental structure, folklore-infused storytelling, and prose-forward novels, Sing Down the Moon offers a haunting and atmospheric experience. For others, the lack of clarity may feel challenging. Either way, it is a novel that lingers long after the final page.

A review will be posted to @overeducatedwomenwithcats on 2/15/26.

Sing Down the Moon by Robert Gwaltney is simply a wonder. It is Southern Gothic at its best, filled with haints, almost-sentient landscapes, mysteries, and the dangers of addiction. Leontyne Skye is sixteen years old and is the only person besides her mother who knows the secret to creating the highly addictive drug, Redemption. When her mother dies, Leontyne knows that she will be expected to carry on the family trade. Leontyne longs to leave Good Hope, but her life is inextricably bound to that of the Longwood twins, the stoic Rebecca and the flamboyant Avery, who live in the crumbling Morningstar Manor, where Leontyne almost died and lost her memory in a fall two years prior.

Rebecca and Avery hold the key to Leontyne's lost memories, but they have their own selfish reasons for keeping her past from her. When a stranger arrives at Morningstar Manor, Leontyne's memories begin to return, and she questions the Longwood's loyalty to her and her own place in the world.

Sing Down the Moon should be read slowly and savored like a glass of fine wine. Gwaltney's world is lush and alive, and his writing will leave you thinking about Good Hope and its inhabitants long after you have finished reading it.

From the opening scene, Gwaltney's haunting lyrical tone pulls you in, weaving the reader into the heart and soul of characters so viscerally real and present they dare you to try to forget them. As a rising master in the gothic sphere and a powerhouse in Southern literature, capturing a voice and region in surprising and profound ways, Gwaltney's skill and gentle care with language should earn him a revered place in any personal collection.

Oh my what a gorgeous book! Robert writes the most beautiful words and story that had me completely drawn into the world of Good Hope Island. This is not a book to be read quickly but needs to be read slowly to savor every beautiful page. I loved his first book The Cicada Tree and his sophomore novel does not disappoint!!!

Thank you NetGalley and Mercer University Press for the honor to read and review this book!!!

“Imagine how dull the world would surely be,” says a character in Atlanta author Robert Gwaltney’s Sing Down the Moon (Mercer University Press, March 3), “if we carried our histories about scribbled on our sleeves.”

Luckily, it’s a sin that none of the eccentric characters in Gwaltney’s dreamlike second novel are guilty of. The story follows Leontyne Skye, a naïve and isolated amnesiac teenager living on Good Hope, a remote, magical island off the Georgia coast where it is always night. There, a “haint-trapping tree” named Damascus grows predatory figs that feed on the island’s population of fishlike ghosts. The women of Leontyne’s family turn these “pregnant” figs into a potent, addictive liquor called “Redemption” — work that slowly deteriorates their minds and bodies.

When Leontyne’s mother, Eulalee, dies, leaving Leontyne as the last remaining Skye woman, she flees to the decaying Morningstar estate, home of the beautiful and talented Longwood twins, whose family owns the island, and Willadeene, the only haint that has ever escaped Damascus. Over the course of the rich, surreal and sometimes grotesque story that follows, Leontyne begins to discover the extent of the power and responsibility she has inherited — and how much of her past her friends are keeping from her.

In fact, every major member of the novel’s cast is keeping at least one major secret from the rest. Over time, the plot becomes almost Shakespearean in its complexity, building a constant stream of high drama from the lies, mysteries, competing interests and mistaken or lost identities of its characters. Between the eavesdropping, tell-all diary-keeping and tearful (or wrathful) confessing, Sing Down the Moon often elicits the same delicious feeling you get from juicy gossip — and the gossip is far too juicy to spoil here.

Gwaltney delivers all that gorgeous tea in densely lyric prose that demands slower consumption, rewarding readers with fresh metaphor and slant turns of phrase that echo and repeat. That symbolism’s meaning shifts as Leontyne navigates the liminal spaces between learning from the past and being haunted by it — between what connects us and what tears us apart.

Though it’s billed as magical realism, Sing Down the Moon is not that easy to pin down. It contains elements of folklore, horror, camp, domestic thriller, poetry and high fantasy that defy genre. It evokes Francesca Lia Block’s Dangerous Angels series as much as it does Gulliver’s Travels and speaks to Samanta Schweblin and Jesmyn Ward as much as Gabriel García Márquez and Charles Dickens.

Reading Sing Down the Moon feels like peeking into a distinct and vibrant psyche, one filled with damask and feather and lace, color and sparkle, violins and theater, flowers and haints, intrigue and unrequited love. But Gwaltney’s greatest trick in the novel is that he manages, amid everything else, to make Leontyne’s struggle to reconcile the perils and benefits of being true to herself feel fresh and exciting. Through her complicated relationships, Gwaltney considers anew the reasons people lie to each other, the differences between liking and loving a person and how much one person can hurt another before the love fades away.

"Memory is a ghost, and she's coming home."

I almost don't have words for this hauntingly beautiful novel and the near ethereal journey I went on with our main character Leontyne Skye in this coming of age story turned on its head. Sing Down The Moon blends contemporary Southern Lit and Southern Gothic with shades of magical realism, so deeply rooted in much of Southern writing, and is set off the coast of Georgia where people & place are entwined to the point they can't be separated.

Sing Down The Moon is everything I love about fiction and Southern writing. I can't recommend it enough.
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

I also highly recommend Robert's debut novel, The Cicada Tree, as well!

Thank you again to @merceruniversitypress for this gifted e-ARC of Sing Down The Moon!

Strong Tale Will Expose What Kind Of Reader You Are. In Gwaltney's debut, The Cicada Tree, you got a tale that could work commercially, but was never really going to be a *huge* hit in the most general circles - it was great, but there was enough there that would throw off more casual readers that are the bread and butter of the industry as a whole.

This book is that to a whole new level. It will expose you as a reader.

Here's what I mean by that last: This is a "LITERATURE" book, the kind of book that is destined to be in the "Best Georgia Books of the 2020s" if not "Best American Books of the 21st Century" conversations among the New York Times book critics, librarians, English teachers, professors... that crowd. The one that likes high discussions with a bottle of wine. The crowd that debates to this day the intricacies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Steinbeck. The crowd that praises Cormac McCarthy as among the greatest writers of the early 21st century. The crowd that debates every single word choice, that finds significance in every rain drop, in every leaf placement. That crowd is going to DEVOUR this book.

And then there is the more casual crowd. The crowd that just wants a fun beach read that doesn't make them think at all. Where they can enjoy a fun romcom in the sun or maybe a pulse pounding action thriller where somehow John Rambo, Superman, a Predator, Wolverine, and Jack None Reacher are all fighting each other. The crowd that would rather drink a Budweiser at a local minor league baseball game (Go Jax Jumbo Shrimp!) than even think to recognize that a leaf placement in a book could be significant. That crowd... probably isn't going to enjoy this book too much.

Me, I've always been a creature of two worlds, always trapped in both, never really fitting in within either - not fully.

So I can absolutely appreciate what Gwaltney has done here. As the wine-sippers will tell you, it truly is a magnificent story and is truly masterfully told. It is absolutely one that is going to have you thinking, that isn't going to give its answers easily. One you're going to have to sit and ponder and dream of and come up with your own interpretations that may or may not be what Gwaltney actually intended... but that very thinking is clearly *exactly* what he intended you to do.

And yet my other nature can absolutely tell you that if you're looking for that more straightforward or simplistic tale - and there is *nothing* wrong with that, to be crystal clear - this really isn't that kind of tale. At all. Indeed, it is more of a mindfuck than anything Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Steinbeck or even McCarthy ever wrote. It is like Thomas Kincaid painted a stunning lowcountry scene... and then Jackson Pollack, Dali, and Kre8 all interpreted that scene in succession, one after the other. You eventually get something that still is clearly this stunning lowcountry scene... in a very mind bending version of it that really makes you think hard and get a touch creative yourself to see what is really happening.

A truly stunning work for what it is, just make sure you as a reader are ready for the experience.

Very much recommended.