EVERYTHING UNDER by Daisy Johnson

If you pay attention to the chapter headings, you can easily keep up with the three timelines in this novel, but I still found the content to be a little hazy.  The three main characters are Sarah, her daughter Gretel, and a runaway transgender adolescent, formerly named Margot but self-identifying as Marcus.  It turns out that Marcus has abandoned his adoptive home after another transgender character, Fiona, informs him that he will have sex with his mother and kill his father.  I figured out before he did what this prediction meant, but that was only one problem that I had with this novel.  Gretel works as a lexicographer, but mostly she searches for her mother, who abandoned her sixteen years earlier.  We know from the first chapter that she finds her but that her mother suffers from dementia and is becoming more and more of a handful.  The novel fails to fill in long time gaps in the lives of all three characters, leaving me puzzled and frustrated.  Mostly, though, nothing in the novel is particularly straightforward, partly because of the three timelines, and partly because the atmosphere leans toward the supernatural, particularly with regard to a river monster known as the Bonak.  When all is said and done, this book was just as muddy and murky as the river that plays a central role in it.  I’m so glad it was short so that I could minimize the amount of time I had to spend being dragged down into the confusion of abandoned and runaway children who are sometimes reunited with their parents without either party even realizing it.