The Girls in the Stilt House

by Kelly Mustian

☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎

“You get through a hour, then a day, then a week. Then you look back and it’s been a year, and then more years, and good things found a way in, too. And in time, you see that them you lost are holding you up and moving you on. Helping you see the good. You ain’t done with good things to come.”

Two women, one Black, one white, thrown together by circumstance in the Mississippi Delta swampland of the 1920s. The world they inhabit is governed by poverty and racism and a specific kind of community violence that the novel never flinches from. It is so hard to read, in the way that the best historical fiction always is.

What I love most about this book is its sense of place and community. The stilt houses, the swamp, the intricate social geography of a small world where everyone knows everything and that knowledge is both protection and weapon. Mustian builds that world with patience and specificity, and the relationship between Ada and Matilda becomes a kind of anchor against everything threatening to pull them under.

It reminded me that community, even a broken, compromised, imperfect community, is sometimes the only thing standing between a person and the void.

Four cups: hard and beautiful and worth every difficult page.