The Shinnery: A Novel

by Kate Anger

Overview

Reading the West Longlist for Debut Fiction

Seventeen-year-old Jessa Campbell thrives on the Shinnery, her family’s homestead in 1890s Texas, bordered by acres of shin oaks on the rolling plains. Without explanation her father sends her away to settle a family debt. A better judge of cattle than of men, Jessa becomes entangled with a bad one. Everything unravels after she puts her trust in Will Keyes. When Jessa returns home to the Shinnery, pregnant and alone, her father goes on a mission of frontier justice, with devastating consequences. In the aftermath Jessa fights for her claim to the family farm and for a life of independence for herself and her sisters. A story of coming-of-age, betrayal, and revenge, The Shinnery is inspired by the author’s family history and a trial that shook the region.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496231383
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Pages:	268
Sales rank:	782,379
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kate Anger is a playwright and a lecturer at the University of California–Riverside.

Read an Excerpt

1
May 1894
Jessa sensed something was amiss as soon as her father pulled up in
the wagon. He’d gone to Rayner for supplies. They’d run out of sugar
and were low on coffee and cornmeal. Though he’d taken a batch of
their usual trade goods, butter and eggs, the wagon was empty. Especially
vexing to Jessa was the lack of melon seeds, the very thing he’d
gone after. They’d been planning on the melons for months, had dug a
channel off Sometimes Creek for water. They were already late, going
for an early fall harvest, but they’d heard about a fellow over in Haskell
who’d made a killing the year before. A proprietary seed and fertilizer.
Mama thought it a scheme.
“Where’s the seed?” Jessa asked.
Papa didn’t answer as he climbed down from the buckboard. His face
looked grim, and Jessa wondered if it was on account of pain. Everything
he did, he did stiffly.
“Bring this in to your mama,” he said, handing her a small sack of
coffee.
“But where’s the rest?” It irked her that he wouldn’t explain. She
wasn’t a child, but a partner in this venture—or
this almost venture.
Just then Agnes, nine years younger than Jessa, came rushing up. “Did
you bring me anything?” From his pocket, Papa pulled three pieces of
orange candy. Agnes plopped them in her mouth all at once. To Jessa,
he handed a single butterscotch drop, for which she had no appetite.
“The melon seeds?”
“Take the coffee. I’ll be in in a minute with some news.”
“News, shoes, clues,” Agnes sing-songed
in a candy-garbled
voice.
Jessa didn’t want any news. Not the way he’d said it, head down,
talking to his shoes. Had he picked up a letter at the post? Was someone
ill—or
worse? Considering the number of very bad things he could
be waiting to tell them, Jessa knew being upset over the seed was petty.
Still, she had the urge to kick something. They were a few years into
what the papers were saying was a nationwide drought. It’d wiped out
corn across much of the Great Plains, causing droves of homesteaders
to return east. Although Stonewall County had been spared the worst of
the drought, the Campbells were always worried about getting enough
rain for their cotton and sorghum crops. Money, and the family’s need
of it, was never openly discussed, but it was always there, staring back
at them in their half-empty
larder and worn-out
shoes. Jessa looked
out over the empty field they’d spent three days grooming. The Bradford
was said to have a rind so soft you could cut it with a butter knife.
For a second, she could taste one. What could be so important, or terrible,
that he’d come home without the seed?
With the family all gathered in their small kitchen, Papa delivered
his news. His hands were folded in front of him, resting on his belly, as
if he were making a speech in church. “You’ll be settled with the Martins,”
he said to Jessa. “The ones that got the mercantile.”
“Settled?” She didn’t understand.
“A mother’s helper.”
“What?” she said. No such thing had ever been discussed before. It
was as wild to her as if he’d come home saying, “I’ve added a wife,” or,
“We’re trading the horses for elephants.” Papa explained she’d board
with the Martins and come home to visit. Everything she knew about
the world seemed to flip. Visit home? Home was the place you left to
go visiting. What on earth had happened when Papa went to town?
She was Papa’s right-hand
man—he called her that, despite her sex—
and had been since she’d stopped schooling four years earlier, when
she’d turned thirteen. Her two younger sisters could not begin to take
her place. It made no sense for her to leave. She objected in the way
she could, in measured tones, as if panic weren’t overtaking her. She
wasn’t quick with words like her sisters. Feelings and ideas would get
stuck on the other side of her voice, no words to carry them across. Or
she’d start talking and her words would fail, trail off, evaporate, everyone
staring at her, waiting. Papa wasn’t in a waiting mood. He seemed
uncomfortable, brushing dust that wasn’t there from his britches.
 

Editorial Reviews

07/25/2022

Playwright Anger bases her accomplished debut on a historical Texas honor killing. To pay a debt owed to the Martin family, mercantile owner J.R. Campell hires out his 17-year-old daughter, Jessa, as a helper for the Martins’ two young sons. Jessa, who is close with her father, loves working on her own family’s farm but detests the labor she is forced to do at the Martins, where her cooking and cleaning skills never seem to meet household standards. Sheltered and naive, Jessa blooms under the attention of Will Keyes, the Martin sons’ handsome piano teacher who takes the blame for Jessa when she accidentally breaks a statue. But after Will gets Jessa pregnant, Mr. Martin orders Jessa to leave. Upset at Will for abandoning Jessa, J.R. sets off in search of him. As the story turns violent, Jessa fights to keep her family together. Anger expertly combines fact and fiction to create a riveting narrative richly enhanced by questions of morality, justice, and revenge. Historical fiction fans will be delighted. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Anger expertly combines fact and fiction to create a riveting narrative richly enhanced by questions of morality, justice, and revenge. Historical fiction fans will be delighted."—Publishers Weekly


"A quiet and emotional novel."—Jessica Brockmole, Historical Novel Society


“Kate Anger’s gripping, timely novel drew me in from the first page and held me captive until the last. This powerful, courageous Texas frontier story about lost innocence, brutal betrayal, revenge, and redemption is beautifully told with nuanced sensitivity and compassion. The Shinnery is historical fiction at its best.”—Ann Weisgarber, author of The Glovemaker


“The Shinnery is a tense (at times), realistic image of family resilience, written with an understanding that while technology changes, people do not. The characters come to life in moving dialogue, and the whole book is as genuine as a Texas sunset.”—Nancy Turner, author of Light Changes Everything


“It’s a remarkable feat to take a true family history and craft it—with imagination, lyrical narrative voices, and deeply felt characters—into a novel that makes clear the precarious danger of life in early Texas. Kate Anger’s The Shinnery is a vivid, evocative book of a young woman whose life presages so much of what we value now: bravery, loyalty, and fierce determination for her own survival.”—Susan Straight, author of In the Country of Women


“With its emphasis on family and place, The Shinnery evokes a more grown-up version of the Little House on the Prairie books or a Western version of Little Women, but it’s also very much its own fresh and moving creation. Kate Anger has given us unforgettable characters in these pages, high stakes, and such lively, beautiful, deeply observant writing, it often took my breath away. The Shinnery is a shimmering triumph.”—Gayle Brandeis, author of Many Restless Concerns


“Jessa Campbell loves everything about the beautiful hardscrabble Texas ranch where she’s been raised, and she’s so much a creation of that landscape that when she’s forced to leave to earn money from a couple in town, she is unmoored, entirely out of her element. Jessa is an innocent abroad, and her dizzying tumble from that innocence is brutally, beautifully realistic. The Shinnery is a superbly rendered story of love and shame and the will to survive.”—Jamie Harrison, author of The Center of Everything

From the Publisher