Review by Booklist Review
Rowland (The Transcriptionist, 2014) explores tragedy, grief, and the weight of secrets in a small southern town that is steeped in history, stories, and mythmaking. The focus is on Rachel Ruskin, who has recently moved back home to her family's farm in Shiloh, North Carolina, after her parents' unexpected deaths in a car accident. With her older brother Garland's suicide the year before, she is the only remaining member of her family, a struggling academic with no tenure and no idea what to do next. Her family was never the same after a tragedy during her childhood forced them to lie and pulled them apart. Rowland slowly reveals the details of this incident as Rachel moves back and forth between her memories, her favorite myths, and her present situation. The complex narrative also moves around in time. The strongest element of the novel is how richly Rowland brings the town of Shiloh to life, describing how Rachel sees the town, how the people there see her, and how places like Shiloh are rooted in storytelling.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A middle-aged academic reckons with her small Southern hometown in the lyrical but heavy-handed latest from Rowland (The Transcriptionist). Rachel Ruskin is having a terrible year. First, her older brother, Garland, dies by suicide, then she's denied tenure for her research and writing on Southern folklore. Finally, her parents are killed in a car accident. She returns from New York City to the unincorporated village of Shiloh, N.C., to deal with the family tobacco farm, where she remembers a night 30 years earlier when she, Garland, and their best friend Rufus entered the woods with a gun and Rufus was accidentally killed. It's long been the story that Garland held the gun, but like the myths Rachel studies, the truth is more complicated. Meanwhile, she struggles to write, focused on a "baggy shapeless article about metamorphosis as exile and escape, but also death." While Rachel is home, the death of a five-year-old girl by a gun forces her to revisit her role in the earlier shooting. Though the tale of two shootings feels manufactured, there are some meaty insights on Rachel's ambivalence about her roots ("The land lumps us together, like it or not," she reflects). In Rowland's simplistic if well-wrought world, perhaps one can go home again. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. (July)
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