’Monsters’ an engaging debut novel by Groff

In the town of Templeton, N.Y., Willie Upton is a success story, a descendent of two of the town’s most famous clans, who made good and left to pursue a promising career in archaeology. But now Willie is back — single, pregnant and highly embarrassed — to lick her wounds and dodge questions, on the very same day that the body of a huge, mysterious monster is found floating in nearby Lake Glimmerglass.

To top off Willie’s weird day, her eccentric mother, Vi, chooses this opportunity to announce that Willie’s father was not an anonymous California hippie, as she had been told, but rather a member of a prominent Templeton family — and someone Willie already knows.

Vi will give only one obscure clue to this man’s identity. But Willie is an archaeologist, an interpreter of history and no stranger to research, and she makes it her mission to dig through the archives of the town and the memories of its inhabitants until she finds the answer to the mystery. Then, she feels, she can deal with her impending motherhood and the messy relationships she left behind.

“The Monsters of Templeton” is an engaging family saga, but the town itself is every bit as much a character as any of its denizens. Templeton is a very thinly veiled version of real-life Cooperstown, N.Y. Both have the look of a storybook hamlet, “a town in a snow globe,” and are dedicated to baseball and the literary legacy of a famous native son. Even the town’s geography is the same.

But Templeton has a mythic reality all its own, and “Glimmey” is far from its only strange secret. The question of Willie’s paternity is only one of the revelations that will keep readers glued to this lyrical, engrossing debut novel.