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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION KEN | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | FICTION KEN | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
As her Wisconsin community endures a long season of drought and feels the shockwaves of World War II, fifteen-year-old Cielle endures a more personal calamity: the unexpected death of her father. On a balmy summer afternoon, she finds him hanging in the barn--the start of a dark secret that threatens her family's livelihood. A war rages elsewhere, while in the deceptive calm of the American heartland, Cielle's family contends with a new reality and fights not to be undone.
A stunning debut, The Driest Season creates a moving portrait of Cielle's struggle to make sense of her father's time on earth, and of her own. With wisdom and grit, Kenny has fashioned a deeply affecting story of a young woman discovering loss, heartache, and--finally--hope.
Author Notes
Meghan Kenny is the author of Love Is No Small Thing: Stories. Her short story "The Driest Season"--the basis for her debut novel--won the Iowa Review Award and was a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. She lives in Pennsylvania.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kenny's debut novel is a frustratingly tentative coming-of-age narrative set on a Wisconsin farm during World War II. Cielle is almost 16 when she finds her father's body hanging in the barn following his suicide, and the novel follows her family through their period of mourning: Cielle, her sister, and her mother try to make sense of what happened, while also determining how exactly their lives will change in the wake of the tragedy. The farm is actually owned by a local landlord and leased to the family, and since Cielle's father's suicide means they have contractually foregone their rights to it, much of the novel's tension involves the family's attempts to keep the true cause of death a secret and pretend it was accidental in order to save the farm. Young men close to Cielle enlist in the war effort, disappearing just like her father, and her feelings of destabilization in this time of uncertainty are palpable and heartfelt. But her epiphanies throughout feel forced, and the supporting characters seem to exist only to fulfill specific narrative purposes. The story arrives at its logical conclusion mostly by refusing to detour into more complicated terrain. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Based on her award-winning short story of the same name, Kelly's debut novel is a quiet and moving coming-of-age tale set during WWII. Cielle is not quite 16 when she finds her father hanging from the barn rafters on their Midwestern farm. The long drought has hit them hard, but more likely his suicide was related to his depression information she doesn't disclose immediately because she knows it will change everything, and Cielle needs everything to stay just as it is. Her father's death brings into relief other looming changes, many caused by the war but some more routine, like her sister, Helen, leaving for college. Kenny artfully weaves Cielle's story of coming to terms with the fact that though loving people won't necessarily save them or keep them safe, those relationships are still worth it. And it is Cielle's relationships that make this story: those with her sister and her longstanding crush are especially genuine and sweet. With a light touch, Kenny tells an impactful story of everyday lives in trying circumstances.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Two new coming-of-age novels - one set in Wisconsin during World War II and the other in post-Vietnam-era Alaska - feature teenage girls trying to cope with damaged, destructive fathers. The narratives differ in tone, setting and style, but their protagonists share a longing for truth and stability in turbulent homes where secrets and lies abound. Meghan Kenny's debut novel, "The Driest Season," grew out of her award-winning 2005 short story of the same title. This resulting quiet but satisfying novel about a long, hard summer expands her original raw, exquisite portrait of a girl in crisis into a broader examination of American adolescent anxiety and grief, contextualized by devastating global conflict. The haunting first sentences reveal the death-byhanging of 15-year-old Cielle's father, whom she is the first to find in his barn: "She looked and didn't look. Her father hung still, bloated and blue." Not every great short story is the seed of a great novel, but Kenny by and large succeeds. This suicide is far from the only tragedy in the book, which even so never veers toward the melodramatic. Instead, Kenny reveals, with a clarity so delicate it is sometimes painful, the human reaction to trauma. Time slows and senses heighten in those first moments following the daughter's discovery. "Cielle stood a moment at the door, expecting the world to stand still with her, but it didn't. Clouds like stretched gauze moved quickly above, the tire swing in the oak tree shifted, and its chains creaked." Cielle experiences life the way most teenagers do - she's hyperaware of her immediate world and detached from the larger scheme of things (her consciousness of the war in Europe is limited to the boys she knows who are going off to fight in it, and the rationing of food and gas). Though Kenny offers little exposition about the era, her austere landscapes and careful attention to color and light evoke the paintings of Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper, or the poetry of William Carlos Williams, suffusing the book with a midcentury mood throughout. Less placid is Kristin Hannah's "The Great Alone." Hannah has written more than 20 books since 1991, and her fan base has grown along with her oeuvre. Her most recent novel, "The Nightingale," topped the best-seller list for much of 2015, and a movie adaptation is in development. Her new novel has wasted no time catching up, having already been optioned for film rights as well. It's easy to see why: Like "The Nightingale," which was set in France during World War II, this novel features a camera-friendly backdrop - this time, Alaska - and a Hollywood-ready sentimentality. It's 1974 and the signs of the times flash vividly for 13-yearold Leni Allbright. In the first five pages alone she contemplates EST seminars, the I.R.A., Watergate, the Munich Olympics massacre, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and, of course, Vietnam, where her father, Ernt, was a prisoner of war. He's been suffering from post-traumatic stress ever since, and Leni and her mother, Cora, suffer too as Ernt moves them from one home to another, trying to find peace in a chaotic world. When Ernt learns that a former war buddy has bequeathed him a cabin and land in Alaska, he believes this will be his salvation. Though Leni and Cora have misgivings about leaving their current home in Seattle, they share Ernt's hope for a restorative new life in the last frontier. The family arrives on the picturesque, sparsely populated Kenai Peninsula, where they immediately meet the neighbors. Hannah, a former attorney, seems determined to prove beyond a doubt that what the locals lack in number they make up for in personality. First she presents the heavyset, middle-aged woman who owns the dry goods store: "Folks call me Large Marge," she informs the newcomers. Shortly thereafter, we meet an elderly man, apparently somewhat unhinged, who offers, "Folks call me Mad Earl." Folks don't just have descriptive nicknames in Hannah's Alaska; they have a tendency to use bumpersticker-like slogans in everyday conversation. Within minutes of meeting the Allbrights, Large Marge issues a warning in a series of adages: "Two kinds of folks come up to Alaska, Cora. People running to something and people running away from something. The second kind - you want to keep your eye out for them. And it isn't just the people you need to watch out for, either. Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There's a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you." In the very next chapter, Earl's daughter repeats Marge's admonition almost verbatim: "In Alaska you can make one mistake. One. The second one will kill you." And this is where I got excited, thinking the town might actually be a "Westworld"-like theme park where the locals are robots, programmed to talk like Alaskans of yore, repeating party lines in place of independent human communication. Sadly, I was wrong; Hannah's characters are just people who like to pepper-spray you with prepackaged plot points, like bitches with sawed-off shotguns. Hannah is a generous author, often doing the work of the writer and the reader. After reading an entire chapter about how dark and dangerous the Alaska winter is - and how similarly dark and dangerous Leni's father is becoming - one might still ask which danger, the climate or the man, presents the focal threat of the novel. Rather than leaving this question to hang in productive ambiguity, Hannah offers the answer. "All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home." Leni and her neighbor Matthew fall in love, but there's very little heat in this teenage romance. It's hard to warm up to a kid who says things like "Nothing is normal in the last frontier" and "This is Alaska. We live and let live." (However, by the time they're a few years older, their lovemaking is screenplay-ready.) Kristin Hannah has clearly found a commercial sweet spot, sticking to the everpopular themes of young love, family drama, loss and redemption, but giving her novels a literary boost by placing them in historical settings. "The Great Alone" is not without its moments of compelling pathos, though, and therein lie its strongest connections with Kenny's prose. Like Cielle, who is smart enough to see through the deceptions her mother comes up with to shelter her, Leni too experiences a moment of disillusionment. All her life she'd "believed her mama's explanations ... that Dad was sick and sorry, that if they loved him enough, he would get better and it would be like Before. Only Leni didn't believe that anymore." But the tidy summaries Hannah often provides for her complex subjects aren't needed, given her admirable storytelling skills. We've witnessed Leni's growing discernment; we don't need the book-clubready clarifications that accompany too many scenes. In contrast, Cielle's gradual awakening and maturation are made all the more visceral thanks to Kenny's faith that her reader is as acutely perceptive as her beguiling young heroine. ? ANN leary is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Good House."
Kirkus Review
A father's death leaves a daughter seeking answers and a return to normal life in this impressive debut novel.It's mid-July 1943, amid a drought in Boaz, Wisconsin, when 15-year-old Cielle Jacobson finds her father hanging from a beam in their barn. Her mother and a neighbor cover up the suicide as an accident, adding to the questions shadowing Cielle, whose closeness to her father is revealed in brief, tender flashbacks. As the narrative moves through several weeks and vignettes, Kenny (Love Is No Small Thing: Stories, 2017) anchors her third-person narrative to Cielle's point of view. She is a gifted violinist, a loving sister, and a thoughtful teen who ponders her place in a small town and in the universe and feels her childhood "leaving little by little every day." The author offers little drama: a tornado that razes the barn; a horse-riding accident; a suicide note left unread for many pages; a subplot involving a wily Cielle and the suicide's effect on the legal disposition of the Jacobsons' land. Even the war is mostly an asideMrs. Jacobson alludes to "rationed butter and sugar"until Cielle's sister learns that her boyfriend has joined up and a neighbor's injured son comes home in a wheelchair. But from the life-altering suicide to her first kiss, everything bears some significance for Cielle's progress toward adulthood. She calls to mind Frankie of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, who begins to think about the world during "a long queer season" one spring. And like Bunny in the double-edged opening of William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows, Cielle doesn't "waken all at once." Still, she begins to blossom despite the drought.Kenny's thoughtful, finely crafted work is an eloquent reminder that the breadth of a world matters less than the depth of a character. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Tragedy and loss visit the Wisconsin farm community of Boaz during a summer of oppressive drought, but all 16-year-old -Cielle Jacobson knows is that her father is dead; she discovers him hanging in their barn. By the time the funeral takes place, she is confused why the story has changed. Her mother tells everyone he had an accident on the tractor-a necessary cover-up to keep their farm, as Cielle learns much later. Cielle treasures her father's crumpled suicide note, kept hidden until she's ready to read his last words, as other losses pervade the town. A tornado destroys the barn, sister Helen leaves for college, and the neighboring Olsen family denies the existence of a son recently returned from World War II with a shattered mind and an amputated leg. Despite the risk, Helen's fiancé joins the Army Air Corps, anxious to escape stifling Boaz and the obligations of their engagement. VERDICT Expanding an award-winning short story, debut novelist Kenny (Love Is No Small Thing: Stories) offers a moving tale of family secrets and heartache that brings to life a teenage girl's struggle for meaning and hope after devastating loss. A finely crafted novel deserving wide attention. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/17.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
