The Undertow Girl
Coming 8.24.2027
A suspenseful literary debut that explores complicated ties to family and faith, trauma and forgiveness, and what it’s like to question everything you thought you knew.
Abbie likes to pretend her past didn’t happen–she did not grow up as a right-wing Evangelical, her parents are not incarcerated for child abuse and endangerment, and her sister Selah definitely did not drown in their backyard pond. Now newly 30, Abbie works as a canine behavioral therapist in an animal shelter, flirting with her colleague Alexis during the day and spending late nights with a bad boy bartender, content (and a little smug) with how she’s cast off her upbringing. But the past crashes in when Abbie finds an unexpected note from her recently-paroled father on her front door: We need to talk.
Selah begins to speak from the grave, forcing Abbie to search for new answers to haunting questions. What really happened the day Selah drowned? Did Abbie testify against the right person? As the story races between Abbie’s present-day life in Kansas City, Missouri, and her childhood in small-town Oklahoma, Abbie must confront her demons and grieve her dead sister at last.
A heartbreaking and liberating story of trauma and redemption, how old ghosts haunt our bodies and bones, and what it takes to exorcise our darkest demons—while still holding onto the light. With sharp, propulsive prose and a wide-open heart, Melanie Pierce asks, what are the costs of memory and forgiveness, and how can we move forward without extinguishing our pasts? I saw so much of myself in Abbie, and felt her journey in my skin. The Undertow Girl is the queer Midwestern ex-Evangelical story I’ve been waiting for.
—Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland and Hemlock
In this unflinching debut, Melanie Pierce traces the fault lines of a fundamentalist childhood: the Bible verses weaponized, punishments disguised as righteousness, the impossible burden of being complicit in your own family’s sins. The Undertow Girl is about what survives when faith becomes violence, and what it costs to finally tell the truth. A haunting, original novel—unsentimental, unsparing, and deeply humane.
—Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and The Foursome
The Undertow Girl is a bracingly honest exploration of trauma, family, and forgiveness. Pierce writes with nuance and compassion about what it looks like to survive in a world warped by the patriarchy, where brutalities are carried out in the name of belief. A gorgeous, haunting novel that is sure to linger long after the final page.
—Caitlin Mullen, Edgar Award-winning author of Please See Us and Heather