Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a modern southern gothic novel with a heavy dose of magical realism. This debut novel published in 2023 was cowritten by Alexandra Cronin and Robyn Barrow under the pen name Quinn Connor. The story was inspired by Barrow’s childhood weekends spent on Lake Ouachita in Arkansas and Cronin’s family time spent on Cedar Creek Lake in Texas.

As stated in the novel’s author’s note, “The town of Prosper was inspired by Buckville, Arkansas, which was flooded in the 1950s by the Blakely Mountain Dam and is now beneath Lake Ouachita. The upper Ouachita valley is a part of the homelands of the Indigenous Caddo Nation, which has been systematically displaced by settlers for hundreds of years. The dam resulted in the mass dislocation of Garland County residents, mainly struggling white farmers but also many who were Black and Native American, from their homes.”

The book follows three main characters, all young women in their twenties. Cassie, half Syrian and half Irish, is a quiet, “all-American girl” beekeeper and small-business owner who runs her grandfather’s antique shop, a local tourist attraction. She sleeps in her parked RV rather than the double-wide mobile home of her childhood, which may be mildly haunted. She grew up with Mom, younger brother Bolt, and Grandad, with whom she was close. Grandad remembered the town before the dam, learned to box like Jermain Taylor in the army, flew a Dauntless in World War II, and taught Cassie to fix things and value objects with history. When he died, he left her his shop and his few acres of land.

Cassie has a deep fear of the water, although she still lives on Lake Prosper and thinks back fondly on her early swimming experiences with her childhood lake friend, a deeply tanned older girl and talented swimmer nicknamed Catfish. Cassie sells the honey from her beekeeping at Grandad’s shop and also shares it with Valerie for her famous honey pies; she thinks of the honey she collects as widely varied in complexity as wine—some dark, some light, some flavored with wildflowers or clover. For introverted Cassie, “When she couldn’t find the words for what she felt, the language of bees sufficed.” Connor uses the moods of the bees to reflect Cassie’s inner turmoil. After a strained visit with Mom, “a pair of bees returned to sit on her sill…a benevolent sign of the natural state restored”—a play on the official state nickname.

The second main character is a pink-haired girl named Lark. Driving on the highway at night through the Arkansas Delta, she leaves Memphis and then the city of Charlene behind her as she heads into unincorporated Prosper. She passes deer and a shop advertising Arkansas quartz for sale. Lark, going on this trip solo because her mom is taking care of her dad in Hot Springs (Garland County), is addressing a chore they have all been avoiding: cleaning out the countless telescopes of her father’s colossal collection on the boat where he went insane. Facing the already daunting task, Lark also has the uncanny sense that all those spyglasses are watching her. Sometimes they even spin on their tripod stands, like weathervanes foretelling a storm. When she looks through one and sees something unexplainable, she starts having bad dreams and fearing she will go crazy like her father did.

Lark’s aunt Valerie and cousin Mitch own and operate the Grand Destiny Resort motel, market, and restaurant. Built from scrap from the family’s timber yard, it had been in the family since the 1940s. Lark’s father grew up working for the family business. Mitch was best friends with Cassie when they were children, and Cassie is deeply in love with him. He recently returned home from Little Rock (Pulaski County) after an engagement did not work out.

The third main character of the novel is June, who is traveling by bus on an extremely rainy night, leaving Chicago, a dead-end job, and a relationship gone bad. June is half Black, half white, and often mistaken for Latina. She stops at the church of her Aunt Eliza, whom June remembers fondly as a second mom to her during her childhood in Texarkana (Miller County). Eliza has been inspired to run the church in Prosper in memory of her great-grandfather, whose church is buried “somewhere under the lake.”

While June and Eliza do chores together, Eliza sings B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, even surprising June by recalling a stint of her niece doing college radio. Eliza considers the differences and similarities between her great-grandfather being “pastor for the Black folks’ church” versus her own congregation being a weird combination of poor locals and rich tourists.

June visits a local bar called the Mosquito Bite just between the road and the water’s edge. June meets a group of four local old men “with sunburned faces and scraggly beards,” who reveal some of the history of the town, and might be ghosts themselves, or something like it. They say the dam was built in 1920 or 1930, or even as late as 1940, around the time of “that big sickness,” which is revealed to be yellow fever.

The traits of the main characters overlap: quiet Cassie and helpful Lark are both described as imaginative, while Cassie’s night terrors and June’s mania had both their mothers labeling them as difficult children. The book features realistically complicated relationships between mothers and daughters and the graceful reprieve of loving aunts. Villains of the story include Jeff Daley—ambitious local chain-store owner and newcomer to Prosper’s marina from nearby Charlene—and, to a lesser degree, his son. A second storyline follows Cassie’s younger brother Bolt, and his friends, as they, too, get caught up in the magic and danger of the town’s old secrets. Meanwhile, a romance blossoms between Lark and June.

Over the course of the story, as murky details of the town’s demise come to light, June must contend with the pyrotechnic fireworks man, Jack, who offers to mentor her. Ultimately June must decide if she will use her special gifts for destruction or creation. Cassie has to face her fear of the water and what really happened between her and her childhood friend. And Lark will discover the truth of what irreparably damaged her father.

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves was published on May 30, 2023, by Sourcebooks Landmark. The authors celebrated its release with an appearance that day at WordsWorth Books in Little Rock and appeared at the Six Bridges Book Festival in Little Rock that fall.

For additional information:
Clancy, Sean. “Arkansas-Set ‘Cicadas’ Filled with Magic, Realism and Ghosts.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, May 28, 2023, pp. 1E, 4E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/may/28/novel-set-in-arkansas-co-penned-by-natural-state/ (accessed June 12, 2024).

Mondor, Colleen. Review of Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves. LocusMag.com, August 28, 2023. https://locusmag.com/2023/08/colleen-mondor-reviews-cicadas-sing-of-summer-graves-by-quinn-connor/ (accessed June 12, 2024).

Quinn Connor. https://www.quinnconnorwrites.com/ (accessed June 12, 2024).

J. Jobe
CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas