Everything changes for 12-year-old Samantha McGinty in the summer of 1969. Her father, Brick, stops fussing over his Chevy each weekend, no longer spritzing the windows with water and vinegar and wiping them clean with old pages of the Erietown Times.

And then there is the appendix. You have turned the last page of Lucy Ives’s intricate, darkly funny debut, and a curious timeline appears. Have you missed a plot point or two or 10?

Susan Coll works at Politics & Prose Bookstore and would like to emphasize that this essay should be shelved under fiction. Her novel, "The Stager," will be published in July.