Unlimited reads at the same time. The Girls in the Stilt House, is such a masterful piece of historical fiction that it’s hard to believe it’s Kelly Mustian’s debut. Expertly crafted and assuredly told, it’s a captivating, moving tale that will sweep you away to the heat, humidity, and stickiness of the 1920s Mississippi swamplands and into the lives of two teenage girls form completely different backgrounds who are bound together forever by the shared experience of violence.
As the story begins, Ada, a young white woman, is pregnant and alone and, with seemingly nowhere else to turn, reluctantly returns to the home of her sadistic father. Soon, she finds herself reliant on Matilda, the black daughter of a sharecropper. Lying low herself, Matilda helps Ada through her pregnancy and spends her time writing about the ongoing prejudice and poverty found in the South…