MARROW ISLAND

By Alexis M. Smith

244 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23.

At a birthday dinner midway through “Marrow Island,” the main character, Lucie Bowen, a well-meaning but fragile journalist, shares fancy burgers and craft beers with her park ranger boyfriend. “It’s not unromantic; we’re interested in the same things: ecosystems and how humans use and interact with them,” she says. But Lucie’s true romance is with Katie, her childhood friend, who has joined a mysterious colony on an island off the coast of Se­attle. The place was devastated in 1993 by a massive earthquake; tremors ignited an oil refinery, killing Lucie’s father and soaking the soil in toxic chemicals. A secretive community of farmers, activists and apostate nuns seeks to “remediate” the land.

This alluring novel explores the darkness of love, how it can cajole you into danger or tip your actions toward cruelty. Clean but intoxicating writing meets an increasingly dreamlike and disjointed plot. By the ambitious last scene — a ­Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy, from Mother Nature’s perspective, and a departure from the sterilized language of “ecosystems and how humans use and interact with them” — the world of craft beers and burgers feels far away.

I WILL SEND RAIN

By Rae Meadows

256 pp. Holt, $26.

A book about Oklahoma in the 1930s demands a spare, harsh style to match the landscape. “I Will Send Rain” obliges with a grim portrait of a family weathering the Dust Bowl as naggingly evocative as grit in your mouth. Annie Bell is restless in her marriage and attracted to the handsome new mayor. Her daughter Birdie wants to leave for the city, but her relationship with a local farm boy tugs her in a different direction. Mute, delicate Fred — the youngest — has developed “dust pneumonia.” Convinced that God will flood the fields, Samuel Bell, the embattled patriarch, begins to build an ark.