Many thanks to NetGalley and Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press for an ARC of this novel.

This is an imaginative retelling of a real historical case, the murder of 12 year old pencil factory worker Mary Phagan in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 1913. The accused, 29 year old Leo Frank, factory superintendent, had married into a prominent local Jewish family. Handsome, wealthy and well-educated, he was a symbol of Jewish success—and a magnet for anti-semitic resentment. Charged with rape and murder, he maintained his innocence throughout his trial and incarceration. He was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. Two years later he was kidnapped from jail and lynched by a mob that evidently contained some well known citizens, a fate that, until the Frank case, had been reserved for Black men.

The case divided the city’s Jewish residents. While they saw it for the blatant antisemitism that it was, those of the respectable middle class were proudly assimilated Americans. Many feared drawing attention to themselves and their own families, all too aware of to stand up for
Frank. Whether American-born or immigrants, they were all too aware of the pogroms of Europe and the centuries of persecution behind them. Jewish children, from a very young age, were told the various versions of the legend of the golem, the clay figure given life by Rabbi Loew In the 16th century to protect the Jews of Prague. It was a cautionary tale about survival. The golem story, in its own strange way, figures strongly in the narrative.

The perspective is that of young Ana Wulff, only daughter of a prosperous Jewish textiles manufacturer, whose doting, indulgent parents are at once obsessive about her health and safety and yet mostly oblivious to what she and her ´girl gang’ are up to. On the verge of 14, in the most liminal and fraught of life stages, Ana and her friends become fixated on Frank and Phagan. Really, they are fixated on the sensationalized newspaper coverage, especially in the racist Atlanta Constitution, a real newspaper that the author draws on frequently, as she does on Ana’s fictive personal diary. The juxtaposition of the two, and the often hilarious references to ladies’ magazines, effectively suggest how mass media was infiltrating young minds even in the early 20th century. But resistance is also demonstrated in the girls’ take on the case. Ana and her four close friends make Frank a strange idol, not so much as a victim of race hatred. but for the qualities that spark their adolescent imaginings about love, gender, and sex, ‘virtue,’ responsibility, and growing up in a society fractured by race, class and gender hostility.

Ana’s gang members are deliberately blurred to emphasize their group identity—often, reference to individuals becomes ‘one of us said…’, and they are frequently likened to a five headed spider, thinking, moving, even sleeping with legs entwined. But Ana is always in the forefront. She is the creative one, the subversive, the one who most tests the many rigid confines of her time and place.

This is not a traditional historical fiction that reimagines ´what happened when. ´ Nye interweaves religion, tradition, ritual and legend, with magical realism and satire to capture both the unreasoning and evil elements of history and the intemperate sensitivities of adolescent girls. The writing is excellent. The plotting is complicated, and I had to read the ending a few times, but those can also be seen as the novel’s worthwhile challenges.

Received an ARC from NetGalley

At times a bit confusing (perhaps this is because I was unfamiliar with the Mary Phaghan murder - i have since researched it and am better informed), but the writing and the fairy tale like qualities of the story kept me mesmerized. I love stories written from the pov of young girls - especially if that story involves magical thinking and is infused with religion and folklore. If you enjoy those things as well, this book may be for you.

I really enjoyed reading this book, it had that historical fiction element perfectly and thought it worked in the setting of the story. The characters were everything that I was looking for and thought it overall had that feel to this. Maggie Nye has a great writing style and I enjoyed how this worked overall. It worked as a fantasy story with historical elements to it.

I did not know what to expect but was intrigued by the idea - a series of interlinking vignettes that illustrate race and class hierarchies through a blend of historical fiction and magical realism. At times thought-provoking, at times visceral. This innovative narrative did not disappoint.

I wasn't always sure what to make of this, at times wonderful, and thought provoking, at other times I felt confused.
It's different, it's interesting, but I'm not sure I fully understood every bit of it.
I'd still recommend though.

Maggie Nye’s intense, inventive debut novel blends history with fantasy and folklore to form an exceptionally vivid portrait of Atlanta during the indictment and subsequent lynching of Jewish business manager Leo Frank. In 1913 Frank – formally pardoned in the 1980s – was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of thirteen-year-old employee Mary Phagan. In Nye’s retelling, five Jewish girls, the same age as Phagan when she died, become obsessed with Phagan and with saving Frank. Atlanta’s atmosphere of simmering violence and growing antisemitism means the girls have been warned to keep together for their own safety like “chewing gum on a seat.” But their inseparability has resulted in a loss of personal and physical boundaries, so that at times they seem to melt into each other. Their collective struggle to comprehend a world in which fragments of rope used to kill Frank are openly sold on local streets leads the girls to take refuge in magic – partly stirred by references to witchcraft in the “murder notes” found next to Phagan’s body. Remembering bedtime stories of the fantastical golem created by Prague’s Jewish community to ward off horrific persecution, the girls decide to conjure their own. A creature who can avenge Frank and, perhaps even, Phagan.

Presented as a series of interlinking vignettes which highlight issues of scapegoating and expose Atlanta’s complex hierarchies of race and class, Nye’s narrative gradually takes on a sinister fairy tale quality. Nye’s work often centres on girlhood from short fiction to accounts of her own fascination with crimes like the Slender Man teen stabbing. Here, in the spirit of Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America and Tayari Jones’s Leaving Atlanta, Nye explores the moment between childhood and adolescence in a time of crisis: questions of knowledge and experience, identification and projection, and children’s perceptions of the adult world. She reflects too on the stories children construct to make sense of what’s happening to, and around, them.

Nye extends her gaze to take in notions of truth versus falsity, how events alter through retelling: history mutating into myth; facts twisted to support their tellers’ agendas. Something that’s particularly significant in relation to Frank and Phagan. It’s said that Leo Frank’s known to every American neo-Nazi - his slaughter directly connected to the KKK’s resurgence in 1915. His case’s relentlessly rehashed on numerous white supremacist sites where Phagan’s worshipped as the ultimate white martyr and Frank cast as symbol of “Jewish evil” linked to everything from “blood libel” to diabolical international conspiracies – like the golem Frank and Phagan are raw material reshaped into mystical, mythical figures in support of the neo-Nazi cause. A development anticipated and carefully countered in Nye’s narrative. Debut novels are notorious for being uneven and this is no exception. But it’s also richly imagined packed with arresting images, with stretches I found close to mesmerising.