Wes Ballot was 15 years old when his intoxicated mother Valerie drowned in the frigid waters of Bright Lake before his eyes. He failed to save her as “the ice had given way and the hungry lake had swallowed [her] whole.” Wes, who wouldn’t leave her side, was rescued by the county sheriff and taken to the local hospital to treat his hypothermia.

Moss, Wes’ alcoholic (and often absent) father, was fresh out of the drunk tank when he heard the news. After a match of passive-aggressive blame tennis in the hospital over who was at fault for Valerie’s death, Moss abandoned his son with his maternal grandparents, Gip and Ruby Furniss, and absconded to Montana under the pretense of finding work because he’s “got things to take care of.”

"While this narrative may be waterlogged with despair at times, both in Wes’ own experiences and in the sordid secrets of his family, there are enough infusions of hope to keep Wes, and the reader, moving forward."

Wes’ grandparents are relative strangers. Ruby is bitter and blames Wes for his mother’s death, while Gip is a lascivious drunk, a dynamic that mirrors the toxic booze-fueled relationship of Wes’ parents. Their cinder block home on Willow Lane in Loma, Minnesota, smells like cabbage and is nestled beside a trailer park. Wes sleeps in his mother’s room, an eerie time capsule of who she was as a teenager, with posters of boys on the walls and flowery bedsheets, because Ruby, as cold-hearted as she seems, always wished her daughter would come back home. Wes finds a knife hidden underneath the bed, and it isn’t long before he uncovers a disturbing secret about what his mother was afraid of while living there.

Debut author Susan Bernhard doesn’t drown the reader in Wes’ guilt and self-loathing over his mother’s death, nor the depression he feels over being abandoned by his father. She has a knack for capturing the duplicity of his treacherous emotions, as he dips into denial and hope simultaneously like a jar of honey tainted with flies. Perhaps Wes’ mother isn’t really dead, and his father will return in a few months with all the money he’s earned for the both of them.

While navigating his abandonment issues, Wes falls in lust and envy with Kathryn, a curvy blonde “fox” with glossy lips from school, who is the daughter of his grandparents’ landlord, Burt Rook, and she seems interested in him explicitly because her father doesn’t approve. “Everything about Kathryn was something I wanted and resented,” Wes says. “She was full in every way. Her hair, her belly, the gas tank in her daddy’s car.”

His superficial attraction to Kathryn fades when he is drawn to the enigmatic Jolene Oliver, who experienced a similar tragic loss when her own mother committed suicide. They bond during an attempt to contact their mothers over the Ouija board, and Wes falls in love with her. Jolene is Native American, and Wes, who is white, experiences a lot of racist backlash, both at school and from his grandparents, for choosing her over Kathryn. In Jolene’s home, however, Wes finds the closest thing he has had to a true family, both in their support and acceptance of him and the respite they provide from his own dysfunctional upbringing.

WINTER LOON is a tragic coming-of-age novel about a young man’s desperate longing to find a place where he belongs and to reunite with his father. Bernhard has no qualms about exploring uncomfortable issues such as racism, alcoholism, domestic violence, incest and rape in the process. While this narrative may be waterlogged with despair at times, both in Wes’ own experiences and in the sordid secrets of his family, there are enough infusions of hope to keep Wes, and the reader, moving forward.