First, let me say that I loved this book! I am from North Texas, the land of drought and tornadoes, so this story was a thrill.

Boyd sees things - she see people's hurt, their losses and pain. Her mom, Lucy Maud, tries to protect her, and neighbor Carla, a soap maker, counts the two as her only friends. Boyd has a longtime friend named Isaac. Their relationship is the closest that Boyd has come to a romance. When a flood sweeps through their region, Isaac turns up missing, and Boyd is determined to find him.

The author makes you feel the land, the people, the dangers! The flash floods have uncovered secrets, horrors and memories past and present. The plot sounds simple, but it's so much more. The characters are rich, even the bit players, and the descriptions are as colorful as the characters.

I highly recommend this novel. It's a delicious blend of time, place and person. Perfect cocktail!

The author has two overriding passions, climate change and her love of Texas. Taking place in the Hill Country of Texas after the drought and floods if almost biblical proportions, it is the story of a gifted teenage girl searching for her boyfriend. Despite not being a Texan and not quite as caught up in the love for the location of the story it was still a page-turner. Dinan has a way with words and that talent is put to good use in this novel.

Texas, May 2015 – in the hill country of east Texas, three women head out into the aftermath of a hurricane and flood, searching for lost loved ones. Boyd searches for her best Isaac; Boyd’s mother Lucy Maud and Boyd’s father Kevin search for Boyd and Isaac; Carla, a transplant from Austin, searches for Lucy Maud and Boyd, as well as a sense of belonging, something she has missed all her life.

This one fell a little flat for me. The characters make a lot of really stupid decisions (but as I've told other librarians, if the characters didn't do dumb things, a book would be three pages long). The writing and descriptions are beautiful; characters are fully fleshed out in most cases. My issue is with the lack of plot and resolution, which is something of a hallmark for literary fiction - fans of literary fiction with love this.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in return for a review.

Things You Would Know if You Grew Up Around Here by Nancy Wayson Dinan is a recommended debut symbolic disaster novel featuring a strong sense of place, magic realism, and environmental concerns.

Set during the 2015 Memorial Day floods In the hill country of Texas, this debut novel opens with 18-year-old Boyd Montgomery planning to spend time with her friend Isaac camping and panning for gold. The two part ways when Isaac leaves after being called by his father and Boyd has to attend her Grandfather's wedding. The area has been under a severe drought, so rain is welcome thought, but soon it is an overwhelming deluge and becomes the storm of the century. Boyd returns from the wedding and discovers Isaac is missing. She has special insights and knows that Isaac is in trouble so she sets out to save him, encountering odd happenings, a live scarecrow, disruption of time, and ghosts along the journey. Boyd's neighbor, Carla sets out to find her. Hours later Boyd's mother, Lucy Maud, shows up with her estranged husband and Boyd's father, Kevin, and they start searching for Boyd (and Isaac) with two other relatives. The land has experienced flash floods and rivers are out of their banks. Bridges are down. There is no easy path to try to find each other between the weird weather and otherworldly characters along the way.

The Texas Hill Country is described in sharp, memorable detail, which adds credibility to a plot that is also quite supernatural at times. All the characters are portrayed as complicated individuals. Boyd's gift of understanding other people's emotional pain and feelings comes with a price and adds significantly to the magic realism throughout the plot. The novel is packed with symbolism and is more an allegorical tale wrapped up in the package of a fast-paced disaster novel. The writing is quite good and very descriptive, but this debut novel wants readers to dig deeper, to compare and contrast the character's actions and appreciate all the symbolism. There are numerous examples of the juxtaposition of two views of the same thing - behaviors, emotions, desires, places, and people.

Interspersed in the narrative are short breaks instructing the reader about various topics - climate change, gold panning, flash floods, etc. which detracted from the actual plot. They weren't an entirely successful device for me. The stilted tone left by these breaks in the plot was rather disjointed and disconcerting. They also contrasted sharply with the magic realism, supernatural, and otherworldly parts of the narrative. 3.5 stars

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Bloomsbury USA.
The review will be posted on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

This is a very visual novel, as the author's writing is so vivid that it is easy to visualize her words as you read. The very honest depiction of climate change was a main focus and the characters were likable and easy to feel invested in.

We’re living in a golden age of climate fiction. Nancy Wayson Dinan’s gorgeous debut novel, Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here, is one of a growing number of recent titles to address themes of climate catastrophe, and it’s easily one of my favorites of the year. Things You Would Know… has much in common with Chelsea Bieker’s Godshot, which I reviewed in April. (Spoiler: I liked it.) But while Bieker used the setting of a drought-stricken agricultural region turned Dust Bowl to spin a primal scream of a story about women’s suffering in the near future, Dinan builds her narrative around the Memorial Day floods that rocked Central Texas in 2015, telling a gentler, more fantastical story about the radical power of empathy in the vein of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sowers.

Her heroine, 18-year-old Boyd Montgomery, is supernaturally empathetic to the point of self-isolation. Homeschooled since junior high, when her capacity to feel the pain of others became too overwhelming to manage, she instead takes refuge in the solitude of the rural Hill Country, struggling to raise a garden despite the increasingly inhospitable Texas climate. The primary exception to her self-imposed isolation is her close friend Isaac, a sweet but keenly ambitious college student whose love and affection for Boyd runs as deep as his understanding that their relationship has no romantic future thanks to their diverging plans for the rest of their lives.

Boyd is content to spend her time panning for gold in the backyard with Isaac, who is wrestling with his own desire to get out of the country and lead a more conventional suburban life. (Or, to put it in Dixie Chicks terms: she’s very Cowboy Take Me Away, but he’s more inclined to take The Long Way Around.) Dinan writes Boyd and Isaac’s relationship and the mutual affinity and tenderness between them with remarkable thoughtfulness, which means that when torrential rains bring on a flood of Biblical proportions and Isaac goes missing, Boyd choosing to set off alone to rescue him feels completely believable. What follows is a surreal heroine’s journey that, to put it plainly, made me go absolutely feral, coupled with a striking eulogy for the ravaged farmland of Central Texas.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the similarities between the new wave of climate change fiction and the frontier fiction that shaped our cultural image of the American West. The classic frontier story is one of man vs. nature, depicting the earth as a beast, a terrifying entity to be settled and tamed. The American myth of manifest destiny imagined the settler as conqueror, called on by God to domesticate and take control of the land by any means necessary. The cowboys and mountain men of frontier fiction reflected the primary sensibilities of white masculinity: stoicism, virility, toughness, driven by a conquerer’s desire that justified any acts of violence, small-scale or large. What is climate fiction if not the postcolonial rebuttal to all those myths about how the West was won? After over a century of stories that glorified the settler, the climate fiction coming out of the 2010s and 2020s depicts the exploited earth in revolt.

Across cultures and millennia, we’ve always spoken about nature in ways that invoke womanhood and femininity: the goddess Gaia, Mother Nature, the clinical reproductive terminology that describes land as “fertile” or “barren.” So, with all due respect to Cormac McCarthy and Kim Stanley Robinson, is it any surprise that the best climate fiction has been written by women? Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Barbara Kingsolver, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Helen Marshall have all written genre-defining books that did more than use climate catastrophe as a timely setting for a harrowing adventure tale. The best books in this vein reckon with the plundering and pillaging that humans have enacted against the earth, framing it not as progress but violence. That violence feels inextricably entwined with violence against women after centuries of gendered language and metaphors that taught us all to personify the earth as a woman. Dinan plays with those associations and others, invoking imagery dating much further back than the Louisiana Purchase: storms and goddesses, mothers and daughters, primordial ooze, pomegranates and the divine feminine. The result is a neat inversion of the cowboy-conqueror myth, giving us a heroine whose strength comes not from her ability to overpower nature but to understand it, to feel pain rather than cause it. Rather than the stoicism of the frontiersman, true resilience in the climate crisis calls for empathy, community, and listening — to the land, and to each other.

Thanks to Bloomsbury for providing an advance copy. I really loved this book. If you read and enjoyed Godshot, you probably will too.

The writing is very realistic. The author knows how to paint pictures with words. As much as I enjoyed the story it was a little much for me but definitely take a look at this well written story. You just might enjoy it. Happy reading!

The 2015 Texas floods serve as the backdrop for this novel about Boyd, an empath who is searching for her friend Issac who has been swept away in the waters. Issac, meanwhile, is in a pecan tree hoping someone will come for him. Boyd's parents, Lucy Maud and Kevin, have their own issues and concerns. There's an underlying theme of climate change (Boyd struggles with her garden because there's been a terrible drought) and personal change. The writing is at times quite lyrical. Is is a coming of age story? Yes, but it's also a novel of bigger things. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

Floods, climate change, love, future, some magical realism.

This book was doing a LITTTTTTTLE too much for me.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

'The old-timers say it’s not the apocalypse but the leading edge of it.'

This novel is set during the Memorial Day Floods in Texas, 2015. It begins in 2003 where we understand Boyd is a special sort of little girl, one who is ‘sensitive’, touched with a gift for knowing if not fully understanding people’s painful, emotional histories. Knowing private things most people keep sealed up tight within their hearts comes natural to the child as Boyd is “a sort of sympathetic lightning rod.” Fast forward to 2015 and the people are suffering through the fourth year of a long drought- cattle are dying, dried up lakes are having a horrible effect on the farmers, and local businesses like the restaurants. Boyd is now a senior in high school, though she has been home-schooled since the 7th grade, never quite having built up an immunity to the emotional chaos and noise that comes at her. Overwhelmed by the way her gift has her processing the world and everyone in it, this solitude from others is what keeps her stable, anchored and calm. Struggling with her garden, which is failing to flourish like everything else on the dry land, she can’t imagine her wish to fix the earth is about to be answered in devastating floods that will cause no end to danger, grief and upheaval.

For now, Boyd is happy to spend as much time as she can with her “more than friend” Isaac. Together, they will pan for gold at the edge of their lake in Hill Country. Feeling a deep, abiding affection and happiest together, the strain is in Isaac wanting to leave Hill Country and Boyd wanting nothing more than to stay. Lucy Maud, Boyd’s mother, likes Isaac well enough but recognizes in him an ambition too similar to her husband Kevin’s. Isaac works hard for his student loans, his naked hunger to ‘transcend’ the sort of poverty his own father lives under as a teacher makes a life in Hill Country an impossibility. Medical School is the path to the life he desires, but he cannot convince Boyd to desire more, to go to college in the city close by his own University. This is stolen time, but they need to come to a decision about their future together. Both are conflicted about their special relationship, and Isaac wonders if it would be best to disentangle completely. Lucy Maud knows all too well what different dreams can lead to, like estrangement from a husband and affairs with much younger women. These pains will both recede and return as the floods overtake them.

Boyd heads off to a family wedding and during the ceremony the rains hit, hard. Unable to get a hold of Isaac on the phone, it doesn’t take long to discover he is one of the missing. This will lead her on a mad, lone journey to find him where she will encounter odd people, a sort of slip in the fabric of time. Between the strange occurrences, the destructive forces of nature and Boyd’s own swirling thoughts the reader will feel as loose and unmoored as everything floating by. The land, the river, and the people of the past that were swallowed up rise to the surface in peculiar ways, and Boyd seems to get lost the deeper she goes. Things are off…

Things are off in Lucy Maud’s life too, stuck in emotions better abandoned to the past when it comes to Kevin. Intimacy is hard to break and her heart still wants the comfort of Kevin’s heat. Lucy Maud has yet to face the realities of their marriage, despite the fact he is living far from her, building a new life of his own. Aside from their conflicting emotions, something bigger is lurking. The two are soon going to have to face the panic of the possibility Boyd is in trouble, or worse. Together, they will have to try and find her.

Carla is a solitary figure deeply connected to the earth and all it’s suffering. Without a family or significant other of her own, she has bonded with Lucy Maud and her family. Her entire existence relies on avoiding the concrete of cities, the hustle and bustle too much for her, the constant progress offering the earth nothing but environmental destruction. Attuned to to others and nature, spiritual, she sees some of herself in Boyd and understands to restore balance requires sacrifice. But what or who?

There will be lives lost, washed away. The present cannot exist without the past, but how do the two tie together? What will remain after everything settles? What choices will be forced as natures reclaims what’s been taken? This novel is about love at it’s beginning and it’s end, common in the demands it makes. It is about friendships and bonds, none so ‘off’ as nature and man, how everything we do regardless of time has a domino effect on others. There isn’t a place you can live where our fellow man’s actions don’t affect the environment. It is a tale of what happens when the rivers rise, threatening some lives while taking others, and the mad race to rescue those who have clung on to hope.

There is an element of magical realism or the paranormal with Boyd, which made for an interesting read. Her gift can come at a heavy price, making a ‘normal’ life feel out of reach, and what will happen when she encounters the past seeping into the present, feeling as insidious as the river water?

Publication Date: May 19, 2020

Bloomsbury USA

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As a Texas librarian, I know we’ll need to carry this story of the Hill Country floods of 2015. I was excited to read this one, and the oddity of it surprised me.