Book review: Rich descriptions, shift between truth and fiction advances young adult title from Valerie Newman

She lives with her father on a houseboat that’s seen better days, helping him run a marina on a large man-made lake on the North Carolina-Virginia line that’s not called Kerr Lake in this novel but could be. “In the Lonely Backwater,” the latest novel by Valerie Nieman, is a coming-of-age story, a psychological thriller, a Gothic mystery and much more.

Maggie doesn’t fit in at her high school, at least not into the categories available in rural North Carolina for teenage girls. She’s OK-looking but more sturdily built than conventionally pretty. Her friends are a couple of boys, also sort of misfits, who seem to think of her as another guy.

In her heart of hearts, she’s not sure of her own sexuality, not that she’s had experience along those lines. She sometimes talks about a boyfriend, but nobody’s ever seen him.

A bright girl, Maggie finds refuge in nature and in her active imagination. She’s intrigued by the journals of Carl Linnaeus, the famous 18th century biologist and taxonomist, and spends a lot of her free time observing and categorizing the nature she discovers as she sails her small boat on the lake and wanders on small islands and along the lakeshore. Often, she categorizes people, too.

This passion for classification becomes something of a metaphor as Maggie tries to figure out who she is and where she fits into her world.

That world is turned upside down when Maggie’s cousin, the beautiful Charisse, disappears on prom night and, after a search, is found dead at the marina where Maggie lives with her father.

The detective working the case suspects that Maggie, at the least, is keeping secrets. She and her friends did not go to the prom, but they admit that they saw Charisse later, after she’d ditched her date, when they were hanging out an old church graveyard.

As time goes by, things get even more complicated as some mysterious person seems to be stalking Maggie.

What is real, what is memory, and what is imagination? What does it matter who tells a story, and how much truth is in that story? As Maggie tells this tale, it becomes increasingly apparent that she’s something of an unreliable narrator — when it comes to what she tells herself as well as what she tells the readers. Yet ultimately, there are truths and even wisdom in the story.

If you care about the labels attached to novels, Valerie Nieman’s intriguing new book is classified as “young adult.” It’s been a long, long time since I fit into that demographic, but I found “In the Lonely Backwater” to be a beautifully written story that gripped my imagination. The rich descriptions of nature, seen through Maggie’s informed eyes, add an extra layer. So does the shifting balance between truth and fiction.