Logic

A “profoundly raw and gripping” novel of a girl’s life of hardship in rural Mississippi (The Baltmore Sun).


As a child, Logic Harris survived a fall from a tree—an accident that precipitated her transformation into a young girl lost in her own world. Logic's mother has secretly wished that Logic had not survived, and she now ignores the increasingly apparent evidence of the aberrant attention Logic's father bestows upon his daughter in her adolescence.

As her mother retreats into her work as a neighborhood midwife and Logic's father collapses into paranoia, Logic is left to navigate alone what she scarcely understands. In inspired prose, stunning in its imaginative authority, Logic is a chilling allegory about the dangers of silence and a searing portrait of a girl lost in shame and fear, and a family and community too scarred by their own wounds to save her.

“Steeped in religious, surreal imagery and references to ordering principles—atoms, alphabets, life's basic materials—Vernon’s abstract language asks precise questions about the chances for survival in a lawless world.”—Booklist