Crocodile Bride

This debut novel takes place over one summer in 1982 in Fingertip, Louisiana, a marshy town with a single road. Eleven-year-old Sunshine Turner lives in a yellow house with her father, Billy, a man struggling with his own demons while the secrets of their family's past close in around them.

The season brings sultry heat, earthworms, and violent storms, and Sunshine feels something lodged inside her chest that she cannot name. She lacks the words to make sense of her father's behavior or of her body as it changes. For answers, she turns to a local legend about a crocodile with a bottomless hunger and a woman with an uncanny power to heal, both said to live in the dark waters of Black Bayou.

As the summer wears on, Sunshine turns to the crocodile bride, the one figure who would understand the family secrets she carries without needing them explained. The book is a coming-of-age story and a close look at how trauma passes from one generation to the next.

The publisher compares the novel to the work of Jesmyn Ward and Helen Oyeyemi and presents Ashleigh Bell Pedersen as a debut author.