May 22, 2023
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.
June 1, 2023
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.
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August 18, 2023
In Rowland's second novel (after The Transcriptionist), a transplanted academic finds out the hard way that you can go home again--but at great cost. Rachel Ruskin has had a terrible year: first her brother Garland dies by suicide, then she is denied tenure at her New York-based university for her research into Southern folklore, and finally her parents are killed in a car accident. Rachel returns to her family's North Carolina tobacco farm, struggling to keep the crop going and revisiting long-held traumas, like when she walked into the woods as a child with her brother, her best friend, and a gun, and only she and Garland walked out. When a similar tragedy befalls a local five-year-old girl, Rachel seeks to break the cycle of gun violence by confronting the myths she has told herself personally and her hometown has told itself for generations. Rowland's spare but ambitious narrative takes on, with varying success, the South's tortured legacy of institutional racism and firearms, but she most resonantly captures the essence of a culture--religious, secretive, and distrustful of outsiders--that Rachel has sought to move past but is inextricably bound to. VERDICT A Southern story that fans of Wiley Cash will devour.--Michael Pucci
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