The Girls in the Stilt House

This debut Southern book, set in 1920s Mississippi, weaves a beautiful and terrible narrative of two young girls formed in an unexpected relationship via murder—ideal for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and If the Creek Don't Rise. Ada vowed to herself that she would never return to the Trace, to her hard existence on the marsh, or to her stern father. Except now, after fleeing to Baton Rouge and temporarily experiencing a different way of life, she has nowhere to go but back home. And she is aware that there will be a cost with her father.

Matilda is a sharecropper's daughter from the other side of the Trace. It's a constant fight for her to defend her family from the whims and demands of some particularly nasty neighbors. She devises a plan to travel north, pack up the secrets she's kept about her life in the South and display them for everyone to see in Ohio. As the two girls are lured deeper into a deadly world of bootleggers and moral depravity, they must confront the complexity of their precarious friendship as well as a hidden past that connects them in ways that might cost them their lives.

Detailed information:
Author: Kelly Mustian
Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/54762315-the-girls-in-the-stilt-house