By Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal
Up from the barren, parched earth, a statue grows. A man,
for a woman is too malleable to be immortalized in stone.
-from The Moonflowers
The moonflower—named so because it blooms only at night—collects its aroma throughout the day, and as it blooms, it spreads an intense jasmine-like fragrance. In Abigail Rose-Marie’s debut novel The Moonflowers (Lake Union Publishing, 2024), the flower is not just a symbol of beauty and enchantment, but also a symbol of freedom, of the “malleable” woman-figure adapting to its conditions and finding ways to bloom even in extreme circ*mstances.
The Moonflowers is framed as a mystery novel set in a small Appalachian town where secrets have been carried through generations—the secret behind the death of celebrated hero Benjamin Costello; the secret behind the women who have gone missing during the years leading up to Benjamin’s death; and the secret of why the narrator, Tig (Antigone) Costello, left behind a burgeoning career at the Art Institute of Chicago. The book begins with Tig taking up the project to learn more about her grandfather Benjamin and to use her research to create a painting in memoriam. As she reaches the small, dusty town, it’s quite apparent that Darren, Kentucky, is almost in ruins, as if all economic progress stopped after Costello’s death. Tig soon discovers that the town may have never seen any kind of prosperity to begin with, and rotting under the surface is misogyny so deep that, even in the 1997 of the novel, women are treated as second-class citizens by the townspeople.
Early into her visit, Tig encounters threatening attitudes from the townspeople. In a town very much stuck in the past, the men leer at her and “[t]he eyes of the boys of war” look down from the posters of veterans of World War II that hang in the main street “as if hiding smirks and snickers.” Even Mae, Tig’s landlady, insinuates that Tig’s youthful femininity might attract negative attention from men in the town when she tells Tig, “Women can cause trouble. And I stay away from trouble.”
The townspeople, we also learn, think that Eloise Price, the murderer of Benjamin Costello, is evil, but Tig decides that she must talk to Eloise because despite having killed Benjamin, Eloise might be the living person who knew him the best. And so begins the journey on which Tig, along with her the reader, embarks.
Eloise is a grand storyteller who takes us through the entire history of the town and the events that conspired from the time her father, Richard Price, moved into Darren, to the fated day of March 17th, 1948, when Benjamin Costello died. Eloise requires Tig to be patient as she says, “Very well, Ms. Costello . . . I will tell you a story. And this one, like many before it, begins with a house.” The book alternates between the present, told in Tig’s first-person perspective, and the past, told in Eloise’s third-person perspective. It is clear that Tig fills in the gaps in the story, editorializes what she hears from Eloise, but as a reliable narrator, she relays all the information to the reader as and when she gets it. In this way, The Moonflowers contains a multitude of voices and formal complexities.
As the reader gets to know Eloise and her generosity, it becomes evident that Eloise must have had her reasons for killing Benjamin Costello. As I continued to read, seeking the answers to all the questions Rose-Marie poses in the beginning, I also had another burning question: how does Eloise’s story end? Tig as a narrator is reliable but also flawed. She often cannot foresee what has already been made obvious to the reader by Eloise’s master storytelling, and, at first, I wondered if it was a character flaw or a flaw of the writing; but, the author lays all my doubts to rest by delivering a remarkably emotional ending to the story, which not only takes the reader by surprise but also seems inevitable. To do that, Rose-Marie uses visual art as a subplot.
In the novel, art acts both as a catalyst for the characters and as a medium of healing. At the beginning, when Eloise Price agrees to tell Tig the story of Benjamin Costello, she has one condition: Tig must bring multicolored leaves that she finds in the forest to Eloise. Week after week, Eloise and Tig engage in conversations and also build a tapestry by pasting the leaves on the walls and ceiling of Eloise’s room at the sanatorium for the incarcerated elderly. The canopy, once finished, becomes the stage for a grand ending, as well as the inspiration for Tig’s final painting, which she creates in the memory of all that has been lost in the town.
At the center of the story is another piece of art—the bronze statue of Benjamin Costello standing in the middle of the haunting Appalachian town that serves as the appropriate setting of an equally haunting story. In the prologue, told from Eloise’s perspective, Rose-Marie writes:
When the moon is at her highest peak, the ghosts come. They crawl up
Benjamin’s hands and feet, wrap their arms around his broad shoulders
and thick neck. They claw and pull at the bronze overcoat, the polished
boots, the erect musket, and I wonder if they have enough strength to
push the statue over, to make it tumble at their feet. All the while,
Benjamin stares straight ahead, never looking down at those who writhe
beneath him.
Benjamin (and his statue) epitomizes the patriarchal society of Darren. As Eloise looks out the window of her room, she sees the statue and thinks of all the women that Benjamin, and those who erect statues of men like Benjamin, have wronged. In a society ruled by men, cis-women are in danger, because even the well-meaning men only see women as a means to serve their selfish interests. The message of the book is terrifyingly appropriate for our present-day world where Roe v. Wade has been overturned and access to abortion and other reproductive care in many states has become as impossible as it was in the Darren of the Fifties. Women in Rose-Marie’s novel are victims of rape, domestic violence, and institutional violence. And in such a society, those who provide gynecological and reproductive care to cis-women are often demonized whether they are in Darren or in Chicago. Part of Eloise’s crime was that she was a fearless woman and helped women in need. The townspeople had already deemed Eloise guilty, thought of her as a murderer and ill-wisher of women, and the murder of Benjamin Costello just proves an opportune moment for the townspeople to brand Eloise as guilty. But not all hope is lost in this saga. Each character in the debut novel plays a certain part: the mayor of the town is a Scooby-Doo-like villain; Mae, the landlady, is the wise guide who often shows Tig the right path and gives her courage when the town and the devastating truth about her family’s past breaks her; and Eloise Price is the misunderstood hero of the story. Though some characters mostly serve the performance of the mystery genre, Rose-Marie delivers a page-turner coupled with a melancholic allegory, and The Moonflowers is a reminder that the fight for cis-women and folks with female reproductive systems is not over yet. Heroes like Eloise Price are still much needed to make a dent in the system.
Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal (they/she) is a Pushcart-nominated, gender/queer author from northern India. They hold a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi, a BTech in Software Engineering from Delhi Technological University, and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Their short stories and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. They live by Lake Erie with their spouse and chocolate lab. Their website is www.apoorvamittal.com.
