The best slightly magical books for realists

This one gets all the way to the end before the mysterious creeps in, where it felt completely natural.

I find Trafford’s novels both engrossing and enlightening—genre-merging legal/psychological thrillers that are also thoughtful and literary. I loved the books prior to this one, but this is the one that first introduces a little supernatural healing that was surprising and then . . . good. Intriguing. He carries it forward into the second book of the Dark River series.

The bridge in this book is an actual bridge over an actual river (the Mississippi) connecting Missouri and Illinois at St. Louis. The story is fiction, involving a body that washed up on the Missouri side of the river, which sets the stage for all that follows.

I love so many things about this book, starting with the title (double-entendre!) and the setting (bookstore!).

I love the snippets of real life (e.g., it’s the author’s bookstore). And then there’s the ghost, Flora. Erdrich does such a good job with Flora. This is not the movie Ghostbusters and it’s not the TV show Ghosts. Flora is just an unseen character, a former customer who keeps hanging out in the bookstore in the time of Covid. Erdrich weaves both Covid and the ghost into the story so smoothly—the book is not about either one of them, but they are both in the background and color everything going on, leaving me with the impression that the ghost is just one more part of the fever dream that was 2020.

This book is about a private investigator in London in the early 1900s. It is the first of a long series about Maisie’s cases and the people who are dear to her.

This first book gives us an introduction to Maisie and her working-class background, the people who influenced her, and the way she uses her own version of second sight to understand both clients and criminals. Her description of Maisie mimicking someone’s body movements to figure out their motives actually made me try it out.

I also got a strong sense of London during the difficult years of wars and depression and a bedraggled peace. If you enjoy this one, you’ll have a nice backlog to return to whenever you need more.

The most supernatural of this list, this book has occasional short chapters (usually just a paragraph or two) by the angel who is shepherding a dying man toward death.

These little interludes give the reader flickers of insight into the author’s vision of dying without anything like proselytizing. The engrossing overarching story is one of friends and family in a small Southern town and one woman’s struggle with her identity and her religion, again without judgment.

There are no easy answers – this book is real and heartwarming at the same time that it is heartbreaking. 

Going into it, I have to say that the cohort of talking animals was a bit much for a realist like me.

But I kept reading as the animals inhabit the dreams of a young neuroscientist who is dealing with personal issues while trying to complete her graduate studies. I realized that the animals became what people couldn’t be for her at this precise time. Maybe they were figments of her imagination. It doesn’t matter in the end. They enlightened her struggles and got her through.

By the time I finished reading the book, I looked at them the way I look at talking animals in really good children’s books: they do the work, say the things, and be the “people” that human characters couldn’t manage nearly as well.