Set in a balmy, nostalgia-filled backwoods summer camp and interweaving two complicated narratives, debut author Miranda Cowley Heller’s THE PAPER PALACE is a tightly woven and intoxicating exploration of the small decisions that lead to momentous choices.

For the past 50 years, Elle Bishop has spent every summer at her family’s camp in the backwoods of Cape Cod. Affectionately named the “Paper Palace” for its outwardly sturdy but decidedly dilapidated interiors, it comprises one main house with a kitchen and living area and a few smaller cabins. Bordering the camp is a private lake and several public ones, though the family, especially Elle, has always felt that the backwoods are their own private refuge.

On the day we meet Elle, she already has traded barbs with her difficult but elegant mother, Wallace, considered the day’s activities for her three children, and affectionately joked with her beloved husband, Peter. But that’s not all: the night before, she consummated a decades-long love with her childhood best friend, Jonas, whom she met during one of her family’s summers at the Paper Palace. With both of their spouses, all of Elle’s children and even their parents present in the backwoods for the summer, Elle is forced to reckon with the implications of her sexual encounter with Jonas and how it will influence her romantic life moving forward. But the Paper Palace is full of equally haunting and life-changing memories. In the 24 hours following her dalliance, Elle considers each of them, chronicling a life of discovery, abuse, betrayal and love in order to decide the trajectory of her future.

"Vivid, luscious and soaring, THE PAPER PALACE is the sort of novel that will leave an indelible mark on you, ruining you for other books. Cleverly constructed and sweeping, it announces an unforgettable new talent on par with Delia Owens, Celeste Ng and Meg Wolitzer."

As Elle traces every moment that led to her encounter with Jonas, Heller delivers a striking and astounding portrait of a dysfunctional but passionate family. Wallace, the product of a broken home herself, is stubborn beyond belief, but raises Elle and Anna with a nearly masochistic reverence for men. In Wallace’s eyes --- and, as much as they try to fight it, her daughters' eyes --- no interaction between a man and a woman can take place without the latter giving off some subtle, coded signal. Therefore, no man can ever really be blamed for anything, except weakness of action, intellect or strength. Elle and Anna’s father, a bumbling, feckless man, acts as proof of Wallace’s beliefs. Although he continues to date and remarry, he capitulates to his ever-younger wives’ wishes, eschewing his relationships with his daughters and pushing them closer to both their mother and one another.

Wallace, too, continues to date, most notably shacking up with Leo, a musician with two children of his own: Conrad, a pimply, pervy pubescent boy, and Rosemary, a hyper-religious girl who is just weird enough to be deemed unworthy of friendship by Elle and Anna. When Conrad comes to live with Wallace, Leo and the girls, an inevitable but haunting circle of violence tightens around Elle. With the gift of hindsight and the crackling energy of her recent misdeed, an adult Elle is able to track the lifelines, love lines and fault lines of each of these moments and draw comparisons to her own shocking but inevitable act of infidelity.

While the Elle we meet is steadfast, hopelessly in love with her husband, and tolerated lovingly by her children, it is clear that she was not always so sure of herself and her footing. Amid the resounding drama and violence of her youth, she had one symbol of hope: Jonas. Two years younger than her, Jonas alone bore witness to the worst moments of her life --- the shocking, harrowing abuses and the ways in which they changed her sense of morality. For Elle, Jonas’ singular, raw and unbiased perspective of her means that she feels drawn to him in a way that cannot compare to any other feeling --- not her love for Peter, her sisterhood with Anna or her competitiveness with Wallace. As a result, Elle and Jonas are forced to reckon with a decades-old tragedy and face their attraction head-on to determine whether or not the life they dreamed for themselves all those summers ago is worth pursuing now.

In the most successful of novels, it is often said that the setting is a character in and of itself, and the backwoods of this book is no different. Heller has a distinctive ability to ply you with crisp, vivid details and then summarize them in breathtaking, lyrical turns of phrase that make you feel as if you alone have been invited to something special. At the same time, she infuses each scene with recognizable, often humorous moments: the gin-fueled evenings so beloved by WASPs; the tang of Clamato; the savage joy of urinating alone on a sandy beach; the smell of low tide combined with the fragrance of sunblock and barbecue; the rage that only a mother’s jabs can inspire. Combined with Elle’s heartbreaking and revealing journey into her memory, these descriptions make the setting come alive, as natural, dangerous, savage and restorative as the best parts of Elle’s story, while acting as a foil against the coldest, darkest moments of her family history.

Perhaps most striking and poignant of all is Elle's belief that years of generational trauma have made their mark upon her psyche --- and her debilitating fear that Peter, unlike Jonas, will run screaming if he sees the worst parts of her. At their wedding, Elle thinks, “I wonder if he would love me if he could see inside my head --- the pettiness, the dirty linen of my thoughts, the terrible things I have done.” It is in these moments of insecurity that the damage of Wallace’s belief system of men-above-God shows itself in its true, most damaging form, and the novel’s most horrifying scenes rear their ugly heads. Without overwritten, lofty turns of phrase, Heller has managed to trace the most insidious, resounding implications of violence, abuse and turning a blind eye, and written them into immediate, crystalline truths.

Vivid, luscious and soaring, THE PAPER PALACE is the sort of novel that will leave an indelible mark on you, ruining you for other books. Cleverly constructed and sweeping, it announces an unforgettable new talent on par with Delia Owens, Celeste Ng and Meg Wolitzer.