Juniper Tree Burning by Goldberry M. Long. Simon & Schuster: 464 pages. $25.00.

Jennie used to be Juniper Tree Burning--a neglected child living in hippy poverty with her inadequate parents and her sickly baby brother. But her desire to escape her family, fueled by a mentor who gives fairy godmother lessons in emotional concealment and manipulation, has magically transformed her into someone else: Jennie.

Goldberry M. Long’s new book, recipient of a Hackney Award for the First Novel, tells the story of Jennie, a fierce, intelligent woman, with a newly-spun past and practiced smiles that mask her rage. Set mostly in New Mexico, “Juniper Tree Burning,” is equal parts road-trip, love story, and modern myth.

Jennie imagines her fairytale wedding the apex of her existence as a “normal” person, but the whole event is interrupted by the appearance of her loquaciously drunk brother, Sunny Boy Blue. He’s a reminder to Jennie of her guilt at leaving her family—and she hates him for it. He “abducts” Jennie in order to speak to her alone, sensing the absurdity of her metamorphosis. But Jennie clings to her invented self with blind tenacity, and won’t listen to his plea for re-connection.

Some months later, Jennie receives the devastating wake-up call delivering news of her brother’s suicide—a leap from a Seattle ferry. Stronger than she anticipates, the thread connecting Jennie to her past reels her back. And tragic as Sunny’s death is, it also contains the impetus for Jennie’s redemption.

What Jennie seeks is connection with Sunny; Seattle has long been their Emerald City, the center of the tales Jennie spun for her little brother when they were children. So, with grief-stricken irrationality, Jennie buys an old truck, “kidnaps” her friend Sarah, and declares that they will visit Sunny in Seattle. She concocts a half-baked scheme for Sarah to meet and fall in love with Sunny, not revealing, in this road trip breakdown, that her brother is dead.

Gradually, Jennie’s armor rusts, and she begins to face her anger and grief, and her guilt at her brother’s suicide. Like the last survivor in a horror movie, the Final Girl, Jennie rises from her victimhood to face and gain power over her tormentor, which in Jennie’s case, is her own past.

Sometimes Long’s transparent machinations—the flashbacks, Jennie’s compulsive jogging, the road trip, her use of myth and fairy tale—have a flattening effect. The frequent references to Jennie as a postmodern Cinderella wear thin. But Jennie is also Snow White saved by the woodsman and Quetzalcoatl burning with rage. The use of myth elevates Jennie’s story to archetypal level: Jennie is both us and larger than us, her redemption looming huge and clear as a New Mexico sky. This modern Cinderella, survivor of the emotional desert, wears her scars proudly, for they are badges of strength. And we know she’ll turn, fight, and survive--the Final Girl always does.

Long’s other stock fairytale figures don’t quite measure up to novel-sized characters. Hollow-voiced Essie, the “fairy godmother” who rescues Juniper and aids her transformation into Jennie, tests credulity. It seems unlikely that someone would give such survival lessons (“It’s positively Pygmalion,” smirks Essie) to a poor, pre-adolescent girl off the street, and Long, perhaps sensing this, avoids giving Essie too much air time.

The obviously named Christian Braverman, in the Prince Charming role of Jennie’s husband, is the one person who seems to truly know Jennie, and he only guesses at the depth of her trauma, which she gradually reveals to the reader. He watches her self-destruction and waits, worried and supportive, for her to return from her frequent and masochistic jogging expeditions. He follows her when she finally tears off in her truck. Though Long gives him a complicated childhood, he still rides Prince Charming’s horse (a Rolls Royce) and his loving understanding of flammable Jennie barely wavers.

Janet Fitch’s 1999 novel, “White Oleander,” which is better-written, also traces the literal and figurative journey of a girl changing into a woman before a technicolor Western backdrop (as if to emphasize the triumph of survival in a poisonous landscape). Jennie and her literary sister, Astrid--as well as films, television shows, and just about every horror movie ever made--join a recent cultural wave of women’s powerful transformation stories. “Juniper Tree Burning,” is, despite its thin moments, an affecting addition to this genre.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.