As “Avalon” opens, Bran, the young woman at the heart of Nell Zink’s coming-of-age story, sprawls on a grassy Southern California hillside and imagines that the “smear of moonlight” before her leads to Avalon.
Not the town on Santa Catalina Island, though a few paragraphs later she recalls a childhood trip to the island off the Southern California coast, one of her few half-good memories of life before her mother abandoned her.
For Bran, it’s the isle of Arthurian legend, a place of beauty and love beyond the mists that obscure it from the disappointments and disorder of her real life.
