The Bog Wife
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister is an atmospheric Appalachian Gothic with strong elements of folklore and/or magical realism depending on how literally you want to read.
It tells the story of five siblings - the Haddesley family - who are required to live by a strict covenant to tend to the cranberry bog they live on. They live under specific rules of care for the bog and surrounding land as well as themselves; for example, no one in the family is permitted to marry or bear children with the exception of the eldest male - who is given a wife created and sent by the bog itself who bears the next generation of Haddesleys and has done so for centuries, according to their father.
When the patriarch, Charles, is near death, he instructs his adult children to start the ritual to bring the next bog wife hence continuing his family line. HIs children, however, have other ideas, and begin to question their roles in the ritual and even the veracity of their family's legacy, including who their mother was and where she went when she disappeared years before.
The story is told by those adult children, who are five unreliable narrators as the POV switches from one sibling to next several times throughout the telling.
Wenna, who has been gone for 10 years, can see what her siblings were perhaps too close to see, which is that the bog is dying. Whatever they've been doing to tend it isn't working.
Charles, the eldest son, was permanently injured - and made sterile - by a hickory tree with shallow roots falling onto the house and directly on top of the bed he was sleeping in.
Eldest daughter Eda has spent her whole life caring for her younger siblings since her mother had mentally withdrawn years before physically abandoning them, and she feels it's her responsibility to keep doing so.
Younger son Percy has been told by their father that continuing the family line is his responsibility due to his older brother's injury - but that he must kill his brother to ensure the ritual works correctly.
Youngest daughter Nora constantly rescues injured animals, insisting on keeping many of them as pets in her room, and she is equally insistent that all her siblings must remain together.
The Bog Wife almost reads like a fairy tale, with its rich mythology and casual disregard for what we might consider "reality", but it's also a tale full of heart as the siblings - all characters with whom it is impossible not to empathize thanks to Chronister's care in developing them as the most "real" part of the book and fully three-dimensional - wrestle with their loyalty to each other, their parents, the land, and themselves when those loyalties are at odds.
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