The Oliv­ers, a warm, Jew­ish fam­i­ly in Wash­ing­ton, DC, have secrets. There’s a bridge col­lapse they don’t talk about. Any ref­er­ence to a giant crea­ture said to be part-man, part-moth is ver­boten as well. This omi­nous cryp­tid, called The Moth­man, was seen in West Vir­ginia in the days before the Sil­ver Bridge tum­bled into the Ohio Riv­er in 1967. Also, the fam­i­ly doesn’t speak of the scars that criss­cross the back of Cassie Klein, the pro­tag­o­nist of this whim­si­cal nov­el that explores the not-to-be- men­tioned trau­mas rip­pling through the lives of three gen­er­a­tions of women.

Orphaned at two, Cassie nev­er under­stood what her par­ents were doing in West Vir­ginia, on that bridge, on that fate­ful day. Leav­ing the smol­der­ing ruins of her mar­riage, Cassie takes her bad­ly behaved pup­py on a road trip. As she sets off to deci­pher the secrets, a band of col­or­ful char­ac­ters (includ­ing one enig­mat­ic ​“cryp­to­zo­ol­o­gist”) come to her aid.

Real Life and Oth­er Fic­tions explores the cor­ro­sive pow­er of secrets – and what it takes to survive