Magpie

Maggie Morris passes for an ordinary person, yet few people who meet her could say much about her. She lives in a Brooklyn loft with no lasting attachments. Her one truly candid connection is with a bare tree visible through her window. A chance meeting with Dana, her best friend from childhood, unsettles that carefully managed life. Dana, a Tsalagi girl, vanished the summer the two of them turned nine. Dana's guarded, half-spoken hints about what happened that season send Maggie searching for answers, and the search pushes her to examine both that long-ago summer and the person she has become. The novel looks closely at appropriation and masking, the methods an undiagnosed autistic woman uses to build a workable identity while burying her true self. Maggie is prickly, strange, and deeply felt. She is hunting for the truth behind a childhood mystery, and for an authenticity she cannot yet recognize.