A profound literary debut that recounts a child's singular story

Since I made you, you may

imagine I set myself on fire--
or better, say: you lit the funeral pyre
from ten thousand days away.

A young woman in Paris encounters an uncanny presence on a tour of a small museum. A study by Rodin of the dancer Little Hanako--titled Head of Sorrow--triggers in the young woman recognition of her mother, a mother erased from her life since childhood.

Thus begins Eleanor Chai's Standing Water, one of the...