A luminous coming of age story about a fiercely lonely young woman’s quest to uncover the truth behind her mother’s disappearance.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Rita Zoey Chin’s The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern, which releases on October 4th from Melville House.
Born in a carnival trailer, Leah Fern begins her life as the “The Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller in the World,” taking strangers’ hands and feeling the depths of their emotions. Her mother Jeannie Starr is a captivating magician, but not always an attentive mother, and when Leah is six, Jeannie upends their carnival life with an unexpected exit. With little fanfare and no explanation, she leaves her daughter at the home of Edward Murphy, a kindly older man with whom Leah shares one fierce wish: that Jeannie Starr will return to them.
After fifteen years as a small-town outcast , Leah decides to end her life on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday. But the intricate death ritual she has devised is interrupted by a surprise knock on her door. Her mysterious neighbor, the curmudgeonly and reclusive art photographer Essie East, has died and left Leah a very strange inheritance. Through a series of letters, Essie will posthumously lead Leah on a journey to nine points on the map, spanning from South Carolina to Canada to the Arctic Circle—a journey that, the first note promises, will reveal the story of Leah’s mother.
Driven by a ferocious resurgence of hope, Leah embarks on this bizarre treasure hunt, Essie’s ashes in a jeweled urn in the passenger seat of her truck. Along her way, she visits islands, libraries, diners, and defunct ice cream parlors, meeting a charming cast of eccentric characters and immersing herself in wonders of the natural world.
An enchanting novel about the transcendent powers of the imagination, the magic of the threshold between past and present, and the courage it takes to love, The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern explores the unlikely, at times adversarial, and ultimately redemptive relationship between a young woman who has forgotten how to live and a dead woman who summons her to remember.
It was April 4, 1984, in the Alabama fields of the Blazing Calyx Carnival, and Leah had just blown out the six candles adorning a chocolate-covered mound of fried dough. Her wish was the same wish she wished each time she saw the first star appear in the sky: to meet a real live elephant. “Did you wish for elephants again?” her mother asked, tapping her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray. Leah plunged her fingers into the melted chocolate. She didn’t answer because Perilous Paul had told her that you should never tell a wish if you want it to come true. Her mother reached across their little fold-up table and stroked Leah’s cheek. Her eyes went shiny as they sometimes did when she felt what she called “a little love spell” coming on. “When you were born,” she said, “right here, in this very trailer, I had no idea what to call you. You were such a sensitive baby. I could tell right away you were different.” Leah watched the tip of her mother’s cigarette glow orange as she pressed it between her lips and was mesmerized by how the cigarette changed before her eyes, just like one of her mother’s magic tricks. “You were always looking around with those big eyes of yours as if you already knew everything there was to know, secret things. And you never wanted to sleep. That summer, when you were only a few months old, you’d stay up all night just looking, not making a sound. And I thought of a legend I once read about, how if you find the seed of a fern in bloom on a midsummer night, you get special powers.”
“Powers?” Leah asked, pushing a handful of dough into her mouth.
“You become invisible, and then only will-o’-the-wisps can see you.”
“Will-o’-the-wisps?”
Jeannie nodded slowly for emphasis. “Yep, that’s right. Will-o’- the-wisps. Spirits made of light. And when you find them, they lead you to hidden treasures that no one else can see.”
“What kind of treasures?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeannie, pulling hard enough on her cigarette to make it crackle. Her voice crackled, too, when she exhaled. “You’ll have to tell me when you find the seed.”
Leah smiled. “I’ll take you with me,” she said, “to the treasure.”
“Nah, I’ll always be just a person,” she said pensively, tapping her ash and looking out at a distance Leah couldn’t see. “But you, Miss Fern, are different. That’s why you’re not named after a person. You’re named after magic.”
“Did your mama name you Jeannie Starr because she knew you’d be a magic star?”
Leah’s mother stubbed her cigarette out in a small orange ashtray. “My mama never knew anything about me.”
“Why not?”
She reached for Leah’s face again but stopped midway, as suddenly as if something had bitten her hand. “You just eat your sweets, okay? That was a long, long time ago.”
Leah thought for a moment. “Do I have a dad?” she finally asked.
Leah’s mother laughed the kind of laugh that isn’t really a laugh. “Ah, your daddy,” she said, “could have been any one of a few handsome cowboys.”
Later that day, Leah’s two favorite friends—Her-Sweet, the Bearded Lady, and the Rubberband Man, the carnival’s contortionist—arrived bearing gifts. Her-Sweet presented Leah with a book called The Almost Anything You Might Ask Almanac, and the Rubberband Man unveiled a crystal ball with a wooden stand, thereby tapping Leah on the top of her head with one spindly finger and declaring her The Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller in the World. Leah didn’t know if he was serious or joking, but she liked the way the sphere turned everything upside down when she peered into it.
Jeannie bent down to get her own look inside the crystal. “I keep telling you, I think she’s too young,” she said, exhaling a fresh stream of cigarette smoke that swirled over the crystal.
But the next day, the Rubberband Man sat Leah down in a tent at a small round table adorned with her new crystal ball and a white egg timer. Four black pillar candles burned on slim wooden tables, one in each corner of the tent. From a small cassette deck Romani music played in the background, while on a poster on the wall opposite Leah, an elephant charged toward her. Jeannie had sent her off that morning wrapped in one of her magic capes—a diaphanous crimson silk edged with purple velvet and silver sequins—that hung to the floor on Leah. “You’re gonna tell people their fortunes,” the Rubberband Man explained as they walked toward the tent, while Leah tripped every few steps on the velvet edge of the fabric. “With those eyes of yours, and those smarts, people will listen to anything you say.”
Leah fidgeted in her dazzling cape. “But I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell ’em something about themselves. Whatever you feel.”
“What if I don’t feel anything?”
“Then tell ’em one of your stories. Or tell ’em something that might happen to ’em—best to make it nice, though. Or just tell ’em something you know.” And as he stepped out of the tent, he turned back. “Just do what comes natural. And remember, hit the timer when they sit down!”
Within seconds she could hear the Rubberband Man’s voice rollercoastering outside the tent. “Step up, step up! Get your fortune told by the World’s Youngest and Very Best Fortuneteller! This six-year-old marvel will blow your mind!”
She went along with the Rubberband Man’s idea not because she understood what she was supposed to be doing, or even what a “for- tune” really was, but because she loved him. What she loved most, besides his gentle nature and his smooth bald head, which always smelled faintly of cloves, was that being with him was like opening a treasure chest filled with mysterious things. Sometimes the mysteries came when he pointed up at the night sky and described event horizons or when he talked about the phenomenon of frog rain or when he showed her a phantom inside a piece of quartz: “If you look into the crystal,” he showed her, holding it up to the light, “you can see how it’s grown. You can see the ghost of what it used to be.” But other times the mysteries glowed inside him, still unrevealed, and Leah liked simply knowing they were there.
“It’s love, I tell ya. It’s all love!” he sang. “This child will enlighten you! She will enliven you! She will resurrect you!” And with that, Leah’s first client, a soft-bellied woman in a shirt patterned with peacock feathers, entered the tent. Leah pressed the button on the timer the way the Rubberband Man showed her, but she had no idea what to do next. So she sat calmly, radiant in her mother’s crimson, and watched the woman. The woman, who appeared to be in her sixties, stood at a distance, holding up one skeptical eyebrow.
“Would you like to sit down?” Leah asked.
The lady smoothed the fronts of her slacks in flat, measured strokes. “I don’t really believe in this,” she started. “And look at you. Such a wee thing. You should be off playing hopscotch, not sitting here pretending you know things you don’t know.”
Leah touched the top of the crystal ball nonchalantly with her fingertips. “I’m not pretending,” she said. “I know a lot of things.”
“Like what?” asked the woman. She took a few steps toward the table. “What do you know?”
Leah clasped her hands on the table. “I know about elephants.” “What do you know about elephants?”
“Pretty much everything. I know their herds are led by females.” Leah scratched her forehead. “They’re called cows.”
“Cows, huh? I didn’t know that. The woman took another step toward Leah. “What else do you know?”
“I know you didn’t tell the truth.”
“I beg your pardon?” The woman stepped back and folded her arms across a row of peacock feathers.
“When you said you don’t believe. That wasn’t true.”
The woman half exhaled, half laughed. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you don’t know?”
“No, I know. I just don’t know how I know,” Leah corrected.
“You have pretty eyes. Do you know that?”
“Do you want to sit down?” Leah asked again, reaching her hand out in a sweeping gesture, the way she’d seen her mother do when she invited someone onto the stage before sawing them in half.
“All right.”
The lady approached the empty chair and lowered herself onto the flimsy seat without taking her eyes off Leah. “So, what do you know about my future?”
Leah knew a lot about elephants, about their diet and behavior, about how their bodies worked. She knew a little about magic tricks, mainly that the trick is to make people look where you want them to look, not where they want to look. She knew how to read books meant for older children, including science books. She knew that sprites are patterns of red lightning over thunderheads and that snowflakes form from specks of dust. She knew that birds evolved from dinosaurs, that we’re made from the explosions of stars, and that one can make a smoke bomb for a magic show by combining sugar, baking soda, and potassium nitrate. She knew how to count to one hundred in Spanish, and she knew her mother was the most beautiful woman in the carnival. But what any of that had to do with her own future, let alone the future of this now eager-eyed stranger sitting across from her, she didn’t know. So Leah simply asked the woman to put her hands on the crystal ball.
“Like this?” the woman asked, tentatively cupping both palms around the sides of the crystal.
Leah nodded as if she’d done this a thousand times before. Then she placed her small hands over the woman’s hands. But before she could even close her eyes, she felt a weight on her chest that took her breath. Leah drew her hands back and, in doing so, startled the woman.
While Leah was used to knowing how people around her were feeling at any given moment—she knew from across the room, for instance, when Her-Sweet was sad, even if she was smiling; she knew by the pitch of Hank’s voice when he’d be paying a visit to their trailer to see her mother; and she knew from the moment her mother opened her eyes in the morning whether she’d dreamed good dreams or bad—an ability that had always been intensified by physical contact—she had never felt an awareness of another person in her own body as powerfully as she did now. Did the crystal ball actually work? Was it her mother’s magic cape?
The woman looked at Leah anxiously. “What is it? What did you see?”
The Rubberband Man had told her to say something nice, but he also told her to do what came naturally, so Leah sat frozen, not knowing which to do.
“Is it bad?” the woman asked. “It’s something bad, isn’t it?”
“Your heart isn’t smooth,” Leah confessed.
“What do you mean it isn’t smooth?” demanded the woman in a shaky voice.
“It’s a little bit bumpy. Kind of like the Peppermint Punch roller coaster.” Leah reached out and touched the lady’s hand once more, this time for comfort. “But it’s a good heart. It’ll be okay.”
“Are you sure,” the woman asked, tears filling her eyes, “that it’s a good heart?”
Leah sensed that something had shifted, that now they were having a different conversation. “Yes.” Leah nodded purposefully. “It’s a very good heart.”
“Thank you,” said the woman, pulling a tissue from her purse and dabbing at her eyes. “I wasn’t sure. I was never sure.”
Leah gave the crystal ball a quick peek, to see if maybe something would be revealed to her in it, but nothing appeared.
“What else do you know?”
Leah thought for a moment, running the cape’s edge through her fingertips. “One way to tell the difference between an Asian elephant and an African elephant is that an African elephant’s ears are shaped like Africa.”
“That’s wonderful, dear. But what about my future? What else about my future?”
Leah looked up at the elephant poster behind the woman. “That is your future,” she said.
“Yes,” said the woman, nodding gravely, as if she had just been handed the answer to her life. “Yes, of course.”
And at that moment, as if by design, the timer buzzed.
“Please exit to the left,” Leah instructed.
And so began Leah’s first job. She was an instant success, sitting calmly, sage-like, unlike most children her age, as she placed her hands on people’s hands and told them what she felt, told them elephant facts, told them stories: “And Ozzy, the peanut-shaped elephant—elephants don’t actually like peanuts, so he would have rather been shaped like a banana—had a special gift none of the other elephants had: he could speak. He knew three sentences: ‘I am Ozzy,’ ‘Some winds lift me,’ and ‘I love you.’”
And that, she quickly learned, was what people cared about the most—that they were loved. Sure, people asked about jobs, health, childbearing, lifespans, but the questions, no matter how uncomfortable it made people to ask them, almost always led back to love. The question of love came in all tenses—was I loved, am I loved, will I be loved—and varied measures—who loves me, whom do I love, how much I am loved, does person X love me more than person Y, what makes love love, am I truly lovable, and so on. Yes, Leah told them again and again. You are loved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rita Zoey Chin is the author of the widely praised memoir, Let the Tornado Come. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is the recipient of a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, an Academy of American Poets Award, and a Bread Loaf waiter scholarship. She has taught at Towson University and currently teaches at Grub Street in Boston, as well as at retreats and conferences near and far. Her writings have also been published by Guernica, Tin House, and Marie Claire.
