Colleen Mondor Reviews Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves by Quinn Connor

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves, Quinn Con­nor (Sourcebooks Landmark 978-1-7282-6387-8, $16.99, tpb, 368pp) June 2023.

Welcome to Prosper, Arkansas, a small lakeside town with a group of quirky residents, an economy that exists largely off of vacation traffic, and a tragic history that is about to turn the lives of everyone in the immediate area upside down. Cassie is a local, deeply entrenched in community, busy running her great grandfather’s antique/repair shop and happily living in her family’s double-wide trailer where she monitors a growing number of beehives. Cassie grew up on the lake, learned to swim there as a child with a possibly not-imag­inary friend, and is now terrified of the water.

Lark’s family long kept a houseboat on the lake, and she has now returned to get it ready for sale after her father suffered a mysterious and debilitating accident onboard. Long known as a collector, he amassed an epic number of telescopes and displayed them on the boat. They must now be documented, packaged up, and sold. What Lark should not do is look through them, however, especially out over the lake. If she does that, she might see what her father saw, and that will be very bad – very very bad – for her.

Finally, there is June, running from yet another romantic mistake, seeking a fresh start, and hopeful that her aunt, pastor of a small Prosper church, will take her in and give her some time to figure out her next step. June is the one who makes the unexpected discovery which bonds her to Lark and then ropes in Cassie. That relatively innocuous discovery is something that should not have come up from the lake, and over the course of one hot and terrifying sum­mer it sets events in motion that will transform the town and especially the three women who uncover its secrets. Welcome to Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves, an absolutely stunning novel that drips in the atmosphere of Southern lakes and lazy days, while also exploring the legacy of flooded towns and long suppressed tragedy.

Shifting from one protagonist to another, author Quinn Connor (as pseudonym for writ­ing partners Robyn Barrow and Alex Cronin) draws readers into the seemingly ordinary lives of Cassie, Lark, and June. While each is dealing with a small degree of family drama, the bigger problems are found in the slowly shifting under­currents of Prosper. A brash new developer has arrived with big plans to redo the marina and he needs Cassie’s family land to accomplish his goals. Lark’s aunt and cousin own the local res­taurant and market and are less than impressed by all the talk of marketing and economic ex­pansion. For June, there’s the puzzle of the over­grown cemetery near her aunt’s church and a de­sire to know just what happened to Old Prosper, the thriving town that was buried in 1937 when the nearby dam was commissioned. June is the catalyst, the change-agent who unintentionally sweeps Lark and Cassie along. She is the spark, while the fire is brought by Jeff Daley’s money and the sinister arrival of a stranger named Jack and his Bag of Tricks Traveling Pyrotechnics Co. The fourth of July is looming large in Prosper, and the town under the lake is not going to say silent any longer.

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is gorgeously written – the authors nail the weight of Southern summer and the flip-flop, sunscreen, damp T-shirt, picnic atmosphere of marina life. There are dozens of characters here, from the main three to their families, the marina residents, the summer visitors, including some disturbing would-be juvenile delinquents and a Greek chorus of fish­ermen with their own motives who share Old Prosper’s past with June. This is a novel that sucks you in, that lures you with language and teases with story (an excellent Author’s Note provides relevant history on dislocations due to dam con­struction and real inspiration behind Prosper). Call it a rural haunting or a summer scare, this very appealing novel is quietly unforgettable.

This review and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.

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