Every Bone a Prayer, the impressive debut novel by Ashley Blooms, is an expressionistic To Kill a Mockingbird of personal trauma. In one humid summer down in an Appalachian holler, ten-year-old Misty, her neighbors, and her closest family members are confronted with manifestations of buried pain sprouting from the earth and out of the hidden corners of their hearts.
As the novel opens, Misty escapes from her parents’ argument and descends through the trees and down to the creek bed. Here is her little chapel of peace. Here she can let the waters wash over her toes as she communes with the crawdads. And it is here that Misty first shares with us the magic of names. Not the given names people shout to get our attention from across the yard or call out into the woods when we go missing, but the collection of moments and sense memories that contribute to our ultimate being. Our sense of who we truly are. Misty has learned that everything has a name:
Not the name that most people knew them by, but something different, an underneath name made of sounds and memories and feelings, a name that shifted and grew and evolved…
Ashley Blooms
…Misty had a name, too, that lived beneath and beside her other name all the time, and this name was long and twisting, filled with memory and sound. She could choose parts of her name, selecting the memories and moments she held closest, but other parts were beyond her control.
The power in names comes from the opportunity of sharing them to connect with the world. By opening herself up in a kind of silent prayer and offering out her long and complicated and true name, sometimes the creatures and things in her environment will offer theirs back. Once both sides of the bridge have been built and the link has been made, they are open to communicate. Not necessarily with language but with feelings and fragments of experience, and each can learn a bit of what it is like to be the other. In this way, Misty comes not to only have a knowledge of her world but also a relationship with it.
There’s a thing about names, though:
Names were honest things. They didn’t hide. They didn’t lie. They couldn’t, as far as Misty knew, and the only way to speak to the world was to be true.
So when something horrible happens to Misty, something she doesn’t want to talk about and doesn’t want to share, but which affects her so deeply it can’t help but be part of her name, then the name she tries to share becomes incomplete, and she can’t trust that the things she doesn’t want to share aren’t showing up in the world in other ways. And some very big things begin to show up.
Misty is lucky in that she has a lot of love in her life, but the petty sibling crashes of childhood, which seem so large in their moment, and her mother’s heartache from her own failing marriage obscure the clues to Misty’s quiet torturous distress. No one looks to Misty for explanations to all of the weirdness that begins to crop up down in her holler. Of course, they don’t know Misty can commune with all manner of animals, plants, and objects, can even fiddle with their nature, but the community does share stories of other local girls who could do things like Misty can do—though that’s all in the past.
Every Bone a Prayer is woven from strands of luscious, effortless sentences that wrap you into Misty’s psyche and make her room your room, her sister your sister, and ultimately her hurt your hurt. You know her world and want only the best for her. But you can’t protect her anymore than you could have protected yourself at her age. Ashley Blooms takes us on a journey of fear and hope and leads us to understand by way of a story full of magically intense communication just how much pain is caused by what we don’t communicate.
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