Logic

Olympia Vernon’s fearless and wildly original debut novel, Eden, was hailed by critics. In her second novel, Logic, Vernon returns to the Deep South to conjure up a breathtaking and tremendously powerful story of a young girl’s struggle to free herself from the unspeakable condition she refers to as “the butterflies floating inside” her. Thirteen-year-old Logic Harris almost died when she fell from a tree as a young girl. Since rescuing Logic that day, her mother, too, has secretly wished Logic had not survived the accident, and now ignores the increasingly apparent evidence of the aberrant attention Logic’s father bestows upon his daughter. As she retreats to the Missis’ house down the street where she works as a domestic, Logic’s father withdraws further into paranoia, and Logic is left to navigate alone what she scarcely understands. Logic is populated with characters both strange and unmistakably real, all of them drawn with exquisite intensity. In inspired prose, stunning in its imaginative authority, Logic is a chilling allegory about the dangers of silence and a searing portrait of a girl lost in shame and fear, and a family and community too scarred by their own wounds to save her.