Little Crescent Island

The world of Little Crescent Island unfurls in warm, salt-tinged layers. When Alice throws open her hotel curtains in Chapter 3, she’s met with “brilliant sunlight, a clear blue sky, and turquoise waves crashing against the shore below” (15). It’s the kind of morning that hums with brightness with humid air and refracted light merging into a single shimmer.

The island’s roads curve between palm trees and live oaks, their shadows stippling the sand and asphalt; the air smells faintly of sea grass and marsh. To one side lies the glittering tourist strip, where “the string of resorts near the main drag” and the “mansions farther to the east and west” announce money and leisure (15). To the other side stretches the quieter, stranger beauty of the marshlands, “the waterway that separates Little Crescent from mainland Georgia,” where Margaret Ives has chosen to live (15). Her property...