It's quite possible, even likely, I am not literary enough to read this novel. There was too much going on and it was too convoluted for me to enjoy. Thanks to the publisher for a chance to read this one.

This book had too much going on. Made it hard to keep up. Such a shame. This could have been a good book. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on my review.

The essence of a dream lost or creativity gained is always a specific journey depending on its consequence and where it begins. With “Treeborne” [Caleb Johnson/Picador/320pgs], the painting of a small town in rural Alabama speared between the 1920s and 1950s is a very specific portrait of both race relation but also ambition or the lack of it. Told in retrospect through the eyes of Janie Treeborne in 1959, the recollections are interesting because they are both connected and disconnected, fluid and yet jagged. The focal beginnings rest on her grandfather Hugh who was an artist but also hid a secret that debilitated his need for fame in creating abstract art before there was a term for such a thing. The aspect within the novel is a slow burn, setting the settings. The life and death in terminology of Marybelle is quite telling but also steeped in metaphor. The most linear part of the story involves a kidnapping which is motivated by none other than money but takes into account the trajectory of different lives and how some merely exist and some are motivated to do more. Janie’s journey is one that is split in terms of its wants and needs. She takes after her grandfather (including a dirt boy named Crusoe that may or may not be alive). Certain scenarios of the way these parts of the story are told, of muddy river, and lightning crackling tended to bring to mind some of the lyrical and pace of “The Sound & The Fury”. Ultimately, it turns into an idea of both jealousy and complacency and what is the bigger error of judgment. In the end, lives simply turn to dust but the experiences and decisions made create a vivid if not simplistic tapestry of life in the South and choices made.

B

By Tim Wassberg

A charming account of the lives and events of the Treebourne family and neighbors living in Elberta Alabama, aka Peach Country. The characters are colorful and the plot comfortable, in that it rests through these lives, of which we’ve all had encounters with in our own realities. Great story to settle down into.

Treeborne is a truly stunning debut novel. The characters are so complex and interesting that the multiple point-of-view and multiple time periods is definitely the best way to tell their stories. Johnson does a masterful job of taking the reader in and out of the past while giving each character a very unique voice. Each character changes throughout the story as you fall in and out of love with each of them. The ending is perfection and the little plants along the way left me as a very satisfied reader on the last page. The prose itself is both beautiful and jarring, as I think all great Southern literature is. If you are a fan of Flannery O'Connor, this is absolutely in your wheel house.

That being said, I had a hard time at the beginning. The story didn't grab me as much as I might have liked until I was about one-fourth into the book. I had a harder time connecting with Janie, which could have been the cause of my slow beginning. While I ended up loving him and the fantastical element he adds to the story, Cursoe was a bit hard to wrap my mind around at first. These complaints are nit-picky though and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the only one with them. I highly recommend this book! I think it will end up being one of the great reads to come from 2018.

Note: I received a free kindle edition of this book via NetGalley in exchange for the honest review above. I would like to thank NetGalley, the publisher Picador, and the author Caleb Johnson for the opportunity to do so.

*3.5 stars*
A haunting new generation southern gothic novel in which we learn how the past indelibly shapes the present in a small rural town in Alabama. The case of characters of this novel is impressive and each one is so well rendered. From the young girl Janie who carries around the clay doll her grandfather Hugh left (a doll that comes to life frequently in the novel) to her aunt Tammy who wishes to be on the big screen in Hollywood and escape small town Alabama living to the black man her grandmother loved, Lee Malone, who somehow, despite deeply rooted racism, lives heartily among mostly white folks in town, Johnson shows off his literary talents in crafting characters who are memorable and incredibly unique. We switch back and forth between the late 1920s and the late 1950s and get brief moments in the present day, and so we get a full picture of this town and family’s history. Johnson relies on the verbal speech patterns to write his story and it took me a while to get used to his omission of prepositions, malapropisms, and frequent use of colloquial words like “Foot” to begin his sentences. But he does capture the rhythms and ideology of the rural South in impressive ways. This book is quirky, dark, atmospheric, and memorable. Johnson is a talented writer.

The eighty year old Hernando de Soto Dam in Elberta, Alabama was compromised and expected to crumble and flood the surrounding area. The Authority had been trying to purchase the lands and relocate inhabitants including elderly Janie Treeborne. Janie, a third generation Treeborne, refused to leave The Seven, her seven hundred acre parcel. She insisted that "me and this place is just too tangled up".

In present day Elberta, Janie lives alone on the edge of a roadside peach orchard that she bought from Lee Malone. "It was sixteen dollar and a pack of chewing gum". Lee Malone taught Janie everything he had been taught about the peach business. Peaches were everywhere in Elberta...the "Peach Radio Show", The Peach Day Incident...even peach pits in mailboxes.

Grandma Maybelle (Maw Maw May) was Janie's hero. Family dissension occurred when, upon her death, all Maybelle's worldy possessions were found to be willed to her daughter, Tammy. Sons Ren and Luther each received five dollars. Janie Treeborne was determined to protect The Seven at all costs now that grandmomma was gone. Grandpa Hugh, when not at work, was a builder of "assemblies", creations made from odds and ends found on land and sea. One "assemblie" of note was "dirt boy" aka "Crusoe", Janie's constant companion and comforter. Crusoe was a mud boy sculpture who magically performed human tasks, or so thought Janie.

Janie recounts, in spurts, events and happenings in three time periods......1929, 1958 and the present. The family acreage, The Seven, was everything. It was the only constant in a family replete with unhappy marriages and unfulfilled dreams. "Treeborne: A Novel" by Caleb Johnson is a debut Southern Gothic read. Many of the quirky characters lie, cheat, steal and deceive. This reader felt a disconnect and lack of empathy for the woes of the backwater Treebornes.

Thank you Macmillan-Picador and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "Treeborne".

I'm always a sucker for multiple POV stories, and this was definitely a great one! Loved reading about the Treeborne family and all their diverse experiences. Treeborne also had a really strong ambiance and sense of setting (Alabama!) that I thought lent itself well to the story. Overall, a really refreshing read!

Caleb Johnson’s debut is a family saga steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition of a rustic people shackled, for better or worse, to the wild land they call home.

The Treeborne family has lived on The Seven – the local sobriquet for a seven acre stretch of forested Elberta, Alabama land - for nigh on eighty years. Now in her later years, Janie Treeborne is being threatened eviction from this patch of the world her bloodline has claimed their own. The nearby Hernando de Soto dam is soon expected to give way and flood the surrounding area. But Janie is refusing to leave. As she tells her grandson, who is interviewing Janie about the family history, “me and this place is just too tangled up.”

Over the course of the recorded interview, Janie recounts how back in 1958, as a girl of thirteen, she fought to protect The Seven from her aunt Tammy. Tammy, who suspiciously became the sole inheritor of the entire family land after the death of her mother Maybelle, aims to sell off The Seven and use the money to pursue her dreams of becoming a Hollywood starlet. Maybelle’s last will and testament has left her two sons, Luther and Ren (Janie’s father), with little more than five dollars apiece. Angered by this injustice, Janie convinces a ragtag gang of older kids to kidnap her aunt. But once the vicious deed is done, Janie realizes she’s in over her head. She runs away into the woods lugging around her beloved “dirt boy doll” Crusoe. This so called “assemblie” is one of her granddaddy Hugh’s famed sculpture art pieces, created using a hodgepodge of mud and other odds and ends unearthed around Elberta.

Elder Janie also conjures up a series of flashbacks from 1929, when her granddaddy, then a laborer working on the Hernando dam, first met her MawMaw Maybelle. Maybelle however also harbors a taboo love for Lee Malone, a local African-American orchard keeper and blues singer who happens to be Hugh’s closest friend.

Treeborne is a novel that is swamped in a sense of futility, and Johnson has done an excellent job of making his Southern setting a force to be reckoned with. Everyone and everything feels weighed down by the town and land. Dreams wilt. Plans go awry. Evildoers don’t necessarily get their comeuppance. It almost feels as if Elberta itself has an insidious power to distort the truth and break its inhabitants will to leave. No matter the potency of their hopes – Tammy with her actress aspirations, Hugh with his acclaimed assemblies, Lee who is offered a recording contract opportunity – these characters are doomed to spend the rest of their days not achieving much in “Elberta—Shithole, Alabama, USA.”

At times Treeborne does read like a Southern Gothic novel by the numbers. This is a book of rattlesnakes and corn liquor, of a cursed backwoods family living on cursed backwater soil. Johnson appears to relish giving voice to the gross and grotesque. His characters are the maimed, the disturbed, the sordid and the damned. This is a cast of kooks who fart and sweat, a smattering of whom have an ingrained perverse propensity to indulge in necrophilia and incestuousness. All these grimy, twisted elements are seemingly requisite in today’s Southern novel tradition, as carved out by writers such as Harry Crews, William Gay, Donald Ray Pollock et al. As such, a cynical reader may deem much of what’s on offer in Treeborne as mere genre box-ticking. Thankfully, Johnson’s fecund language rooted in an earthy Southern vernacular render these somewhat hackneyed aesthetic points fresh and poetic.

While it offers little that is new to this literary sub-genre, Treeborne is a worthy, authentic addition to the contemporary Southern canon.

Treeborne is a beautiful, messy novel about a family... about life... about memory... about history. It's gorgeous and lush. There were a few times the story jumped all over the place but all in all this was a wonderful read.

I didn't really care for this book. It was hard to follow the story line and was just confusing for me.

'What makes an Elberta so sweet, Lee Malone knew, is how long it’s allowed to trouble the tree.'

Could that be true of Janie Treeborne too, being allowed to trouble her own land? This southern fiction debut begins with Janie Treeborne refusing to leave her family land, The Seven in Elberta, Alabama despite knowing that ‘the water is coming.’ The Hernando de Soto dam has ‘served it’s purpose for 80 years’, her grandfather having built it, her own father Ren an engineer but it is failing now, it must be imploded. But there is nothing that will make her leave, no sir. She has fought long and hard to maintain her hold, she would’t even trade her bad eye for a good one to leave this land that she is as much a part of as the trees. “…me and this place is just too tangled up.”

Janie tells her entire family history, and how her aunt Tammy came to be kidnapped, because everything had to be preserved. “Life ain’t easy Sister.” Janie grew up a wild thing, as wild as the land, drinking from the water tadpoles swam in. Growing up wanting nothing more than to be just like her old grandmother Maybelle, filling her ears with great stories about the land. Janie spends her time toting around dirt boy Crusoe, a creation of her eccentric junk artist Grandaddy Hugh, one that talks to her, to the Treeborne kin. A peculiar thing, this living dirt boy, or is the family crazy? Furious that her aunt Tammy and Uncle Wooten want to log trees to sell and to build a new home, even leveling her grandfather’s “assemblies” to make a foundation for the place, she refuses to allow them to destroy everything. Discovering her MawMaw May’s will leave Tammy The Seven feels like a manipulation. Tammy doesn’t love the place, she wants to sell, she wanted all her life to be a movie star.Janie knows it was MawMaw’s true intention to see the land split among the silblings and so she devises a wild mean plan of her own, to ‘take care of’ her aunt. She is desperate to save the land she is obsessed with. MawMaw’s death is the catalyst that causes the wild thing in Janie to grow.

Telling of the past while being interviewed by her grandson, she too shares the story of Hugh Treeborne’s Seven Hundred Acre Junk Garden, his peculiar creations that a ‘Yankee’ took interest in and took advantage. We get to know many generations of Treebornes in the telling, all their longings and misdeeds. Lee Malone is as much a part of the Treebornes as Janie is, an African-American, the one who owned the Peach Pit bought for whatever money he had in his billfold, who later sells it to Janie, owning it all the same way he obtained it from the wealthy Mr. Prince. But Lee Malone is so much more than just the prior owner of the Peach Orchard, he and MawMaw had their own special relationship. When Tammy goes missing, somehow he is pulled into helping search, a funny thing considering all she has done to him. What happened to Maybelle, we at least understand more in the end, so many seemed to unravel with her tragic death. The stories are more about living with a family for a time, through the years and their antics in the wilds. Stubborn as hell our Janie is, even in her old bone days. Maybe the town has seen battles, but the Treebornes seem to battle each other and themselves more than anything. Hugh and Janie are eccentric characters, and the most fascinating but there were times I was lost in other characters stories taking me in too many directions. It’s a lot to keep up with, however the language is perfection and the southern dialogue is never abandoned, certainly not an easy thing to write.

I am curious to read more from this author, who understands a south few others can write as genuinely about.

Available Now

Picador

This debut novel is classic southern - Caleb Johnson can take his place among the best of them. He brings us angst and anger as well as love and laughter, and it all fits neatly into the background of small town boredom and anti-miscegenation laws. Although it would be hard to be bored in Johnson's Elberta, Alabama. I enjoyed the way he folded in the influence of the Elberta Tribe - something not often acknowledged in modern southern literature - and the understanding and love obvious in the characters of his older citizens. Also the importance of the local employers - not necessarily the Authority, bringing in and maintaining the dam on the Elberta River, but the locals keeping the town moving along in spite of progress. Dirt boy Crusoe is a classic, as well. And Hugh's found art - his assemblies that more or less took over his life. The appearance of the hole in Lee's guitar. I loved the way the orchard was passed down generation to generation, and it's importance in the community. And the women - I loved all the women. Janie of course, who is our spokesperson but also Maybelle and Tammy.

Though the story travels back and forth through time, from 1929 into late 1959, it is easily followed and understood. the story is tightly written and the characters flawed but lovely. This is an author I will follow.

I received a free electronic copy of this southern novel from Netgalley, Caleb Johnson, and Picador in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

This is an intriguing debut. Johnson has chosen a challenging way to tell the story of a family- the Treebornes - and their small town of Elberta, Alabama in a sort of oral history. This spans 30 years of oddity, bad decisions, love, loss, and well, lots of stuff. In fact, there might be a little too much crammed in here but that's how life works. Janie is the narrator, telling her tale as the government closes in to take her land via a flood. Her grandfather Hugh was an artist whose "found art" was appropriated by someone else- and he's a bit different, as is Janie herself. This wasn't an easy read but it was rewarding. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

This really felt messy - although I'm usually into family stories with secrets, etc. this fell flat for me.

This is a fascinating debut novel set in Elberta, Ala., during the late 1920s and late 1950s. The story begins today as a young man interviews Janie Treeborne about her life and family. We learn about this intriguing Southern family by revisiting those years.
Holding the thread linking these years is Crusoe. I’m not going to go into any details about him because I want people to be as surprised as I was.
The Treeborne family owned what they called “The Seven,” and the property was willed to daughter Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale rather than split among the children. Tammy and her husband are cutting trees to build a house, and all young Janie can see is that The Authority (the area’s largest employer) wants to get their hands on the property. Janie and some of her friends take action. As all of this goes on, the story pops back to the 1929s where we learn about Hugh Treeborne, his art, and his wife, Maybelle.
Read this book carefully or else you will miss important parts of the story.

Treeborne is a complex novel ,that if I am honest, is difficult to traverse. The story of the novel is about Janie, when we first meet her, is a stubborn old woman whose house, on the edge of a peach orchard, will be flooded when the local dam is finally destroyed. For three years she has thrown away all the Authority paperwork because she isn’t going anywhere. She has fought hard to hold on to her family’s land around Elberta, Alabama called the Seven. There are many twists and other owners of the land and it frankly is a bit difficult to keep track of.


There was depth of some of the characters, through their quirkiness. Unfortunately, the strangeness wasn’t really explored in the kind of depth I felt their characters warranted. Treeborne fell short of a great story, without some sort of psychological explanations for the characters and their actions. Otherwise it was only characters doing bad things to each other with no thought for the consequences. And not a great explanation to help the reader bond with the story.

Thank you to #NetGalley and the publisher for a pre-publication ebook in exchange for an honest review.

This was an okay read. Sorry, but admittedly, not absolutely intriguing. A bit drawn out. Felt no connection. The synopsis was what drew me to the novel. Once, reading...it no longer grabbed my attention.

It definitely would be a Book Club selection as there are plots and characters that are worthy of discussion and examination.

Loved it. Engrossing, well-paced and got me hooked from the first chapter. I'm putting this forward as a book club selection for our readership. Thanks so much for approving me.

A wonderfully original and gloriously written novel peopled with rich and memorable characters. Truly a novel to be savored.