At times, Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel, A TINY UPWARD SHOVE, is almost painfully difficult to read. It’s not because the language is obscure or complex, and it’s not because the imagery is confusing or the sentence structure too dense. Rather, at certain points, the sheer weight of the violence, disappointment and heartbreak that Chadburn writes about becomes nearly too much to bear, especially once readers realize that much of what she chronicles is based on real-life tragedies.

"[A]s the relationship between Marina and Alex demonstrates most poignantly, [this book is] also a celebration of the ways in which love and loyalty can persist and grow despite the desolation and violence that surrounds it."

The central figure of this richly textured novel is Marina Salles, a young Filipino American girl who is raised by her grandmother and her occasionally loving, too often neglectful mother. Readers know almost from the opening pages that Marina has been murdered, the latest victim of a serial sexual predator and killer who preys on sex workers and drug-addicted women. But what Marina’s murderer doesn’t count on is that her body is occupied by an aswang, a Filipino spirit that is transmitted from generation to generation when people die and leave behind unfinished business.

How Marina got to this desperate, tragic place, and what business she left unfinished, forms the crux of the rest of the book. Chadburn intersperses scenes from Marina’s family (including those of her ancestors), her childhood and eventually her young adulthood with vignettes of her killer’s thought processes and insights into his background. What’s striking is some of the similarities in their life stories. One becomes a tragic victim while the other is twisted into a monstrous predator, but both are shaped in large part by economic insecurity and deprivation.

Chadburn also recounts the stories of other secondary characters, most notably that of Alex, a young woman whom Marina befriends at a foster care facility when she’s taken into child and protective services custody following a disturbing failure of her mother to protect her from sexual violence. Alex’s story, brief as it is, is perhaps even more troubling than Marina’s own. But the loyalty and passion that arise from their relationship may be the thing that inspires the aswang to inhabit Marina’s body and save countless other young women from sharing her fate.

A TINY UPWARD SHOVE may sound unrelentingly bleak, with its graphic and upsetting descriptions of rape, child abuse and blatant abuses of power wielded primarily by men against women and girls who are marginalized by virtue of their gender, race and/or immigration status. But, as the relationship between Marina and Alex demonstrates most poignantly, it’s also a celebration of the ways in which love and loyalty can persist and grow despite the desolation and violence that surrounds it.