This is the first time that I have read any of Michael Farris Smith’s writing and I was quite impressed by how his writing pulled me in. I read this book over the course of a single day. When I did put it down, I quickly found myself coming back to it. This isn’t a feel-good story. It is a story of desperation filled with flawed characters that came to life through the writing. I am so glad that I decided to give this book a try.

Jessie finds herself on the run with her toddler son, Jace. She decides to go home to her father, Wade, whom she hasn’t seen since she left when she ran off with Jace’s father as a teen. Jessie knows that people are after Holt and running was the only option but she is worried about what might have happened to him. There aren’t a lot of options in the hurricane-ravaged lands of southern Mississippi where the land is too wet to grow crops anymore. They will find themselves in more danger before things are over.

The descriptions in this book were incredibly vivid. I felt Jessie’s worry when she was on the run with her son and I loved seeing Wade encounter the grandchild that he didn’t know existed. All of the characters in this story were flawed but they were doing the best that they could, with a few setbacks. They obviously cared about each other even though they didn’t always know how to show it.

I would recommend this book to others. I thought that this book was not only incredibly well-written but also entertaining and thought-provoking. I would not hesitate to read more of this author’s work in the future.

I received a review copy of this book from Little, Brown and Company. ( )

Powerful writing producing characters like I've never seen before and a vivid landscape. The author brings to life a hurricane ravaged Mississippi bottomlands where the concept of home is becoming meaningless. How do we keep going when even the land turns against you? ( )

Set in the hurricane-ravaged, economically deprived Mississippi-Louisiana border region on the Gulf Coast, this darkly atmospheric novel begins promisingly but ultimately fails to deliver. Three years before the main action, Jessie, a young motherless woman—barely eighteen, ran off with a man a dozen years her senior. Now she has a young son and is in imminent danger. Before meeting Jessie, her partner, Holt, travelled for a while with a sinister revivalist female preacher named Elser. In one derelict southern town after another, Holt’s job was to collect the offerings of the poor who gathered for sermons under the tent. Elser travelled in a black hearse, increasingly in the company of a tall, gray-suited, bespectacled man—a malevolent presence who seemingly appeared out of nowhere. It’s not clear why Holt felt moved to steal the large ring of medieval-looking keys that were given to Elser by her shadowy accomplice, but ever since the theft, he’s been a wanted man. As the novel opens, Holt has been gone for eleven days. Sensing that Elser’s minions are now coming for her, Jessie has no choice but to flee from the remote Louisiana farm (where she’s been hiding with Holt and her child) and return to Wade, the father she ran from a few years before. The story unfolds as a massive hurricane muscles in from the south.

The first half of Smith’s novel is strong and controlled. The author expertly creates tension and a sense of menace. His haunted characters engage the reader and even intrigue. He sets up an interesting problem but proves in the second half of the book that he is not up to the task of providing a clean resolution. This latter section, which largely focuses on Wade’s efforts to help the daughter he loves but feels he failed in the past, reads as though it were written by a different author. The prose becomes careless: the grammar is sloppy; the sentences rambling; the diction imprecise— all of it bloated with excess detail. Holt’s reasons for stealing the keys at all as well as their actual significance are never clarified. The door that the keys unlock could surely have been breached by other means. Even more problematic, however, are the actual nature and purpose of Elser and the gray man’s sinister operations at a site deep in the Mississippi wilds. The novel’s conclusion has some formulaic elements but is otherwise a disappointing, muddled mess. By the time I read it, I was no longer invested in the characters or the story. I simply wanted the book to end.

I’d like to thank Net Galley and the publisher for the free advance copy of the novel. It appears that I’m an outlier, but I really cannot recommend this book. ( )