Fabulous and engrossing, both faithful to the real-world details of central Texas and wildly imaginative, peopled with treasure hunters, prehistoric beasts, distracted professors and one improbable young woman facing a momentous decision. Dinan's storytelling flows as forcefully as a flash flood in this spellbinding first novel in which a handsome young man, refreshingly, awaits rescue by a powerful woman.” —Shelf Awareness
“There's more than a little of Salman Rushdie's magical realism at play, as ghosts wander through the mist, scarecrows walk and vines reclaim the landscape… Dinan offers readers a reminder that what happened in Texas nearly five years ago is just one small piece of the climate disasters to come.” —Associated Press
"Readers walk a central Texas suffused with the histories of the Comanche, the families of immigrant settlers, the Mexicans and American soldiers who battled over the state’s imaginary borders… Dinan’s beautiful prose focuses on the specifics of Texas history and lessons gleaned from larger human stories." - Star Tribune
"In central Texas, where the story is set, severe drought has been followed by a flood of biblical scale. ... Threaded into it are short omniscient chapters both lamenting our environmental collapse and extolling the unique history and geology of the region… page-turning." - Wall Street Journal
"Picturesque… [a] detailed portrait of a part of Texas whose novelistic potential few authors have tapped." - Texas Monthly
“This strange brew of a book nods to the picaresque novel, is shot through with magical realism, and undergirded by a naturalist's concern for Mother Earth-and it's all wrapped in lovely sentences. Book groups will have field days discussing this.” —Booklist, starred review
"Eerie, damning, and altogether enchanting... a book of rugged beauty and raw empathy that revels in its unpredictability — conjuring up motifs and themes that run the gamut of empathy, self-discovery, snakes, and water." - Southern Review of Books
“Dinan's first novel takes a mildly numinous, not so mildly pre-apocalyptic approach in following the lives of a young Texas Hill Country teenager and her loved ones as they fight to find each other, or at least survive, in their suddenly devastated landscape…By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.” —Kirkus
“Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here is proof that the finest American novelist of her generation has taken the stage. Nancy Wayson Dinan has created a Texas drought, a hundred years flood, and characters so real we can't help but fall in love with them, no matter what might happen next.” —Dennis Covington, author of SALVATION ON SAND MOUNTAIN, a National Book Award Finalist
“In this astonishing debut novel, dream and dread and hope braid into a single, unforgettable tale: what happened when the flood came that changed everything. Part adventure story, part elegy for a planet that Nancy Wayson Dinan mourns with rich and unsentimental comprehension, Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here explores love and loss and the limits of those things in our lives. It washes away old boundaries and creates a world that is new, slightly menacing, and thrilling.” —Erin McGraw, author of THE SEAMSTRESSES OF HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD
“Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here is a cautionary fairy tale for our troubled ecological age. Dinan maps her version of the Texas Hill Country in such vivid and gorgeous detail that no matter the dangers her intrepid characters face readers will thrill to explore it. Precise and full-hearted, reverently attentive to the natural world, and woven through with subtle magic, Nancy Wayson Dinan has reinvented the Western for our newest frontier: the approaching end of the Anthropocene. Like the cataclysmic storm that sets this book in motion, Dinan's stunning debut will carry readers clean away.” —Katie Cortese author of MAKE WAY FOR HER AND OTHER STORIES
“A harrowing debut that pulls you down into a central Texas underworld, a place where the soil is deep with myth and injustice. When a flood sweeps over the countryside like the eve of the apocalypse, shattering already fractured families, ghosts rise with the river to collect history's due. Dinan's novel will drown you with beauty and grief.” —Micah Dean Hicks, Author of BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES
“[A] glorious debut novel [with] a complex collection of themes: feminine power, the horrors of climate change, the destruction of land and the power of memory. The story it tells is equally imbued with such combinations: fantasy with reality, anger with love, history with future, and water with earth…Dinan's debut is a tragedy, but also a memorialization, a way to capture what has been lost, to immortalize the land she loves, and to save history from being drowned in the flood of human error.” —Paperback Paris
2020-03-02
Centered around an actual Memorial Day flood in 2015, Dinan’s first novel takes a mildly numinous, not so mildly pre-apocalyptic approach in following the lives of a young Texas Hill Country teenager and her loved ones as they fight to find each other, or at least survive, in their suddenly devastated landscape.
Supersensitive Boyd, 18, has an unusual, not necessarily welcome, ability: Like a dowser, she can sense others’ pain. Home-schooled, she lives with her mother, Lucy Maud, who has divorced but not stopped loving her father, Kevin, a classics professor now living in Austin and in love with one of his grad students. Boyd’s dearest friend and sort of lover is Isaac, a pre-med student at the University of Texas. Isaac and Boyd plan to spend the summer panning for gold in Boyd’s backyard and figuring out where their relationship is going given that introverted Boyd wants to stay in their safe, isolated rural world while down-to-earth Isaac yearns to leave and lead a more conventional, materialistic life. But when the rains pour down, ending a long drought, on the same weekend that Boyd’s maternal grandfather is getting married with her father as best man, Boyd and Isaac each end up alone. Isaac finds himself stranded high in a pecan tree with an array of usually wild animals while a river surges below. Sensing that he's in danger, Boyd goes searching for him. Along the way she meets a number of otherworldly characters caught in a quirk of time caused by the weather. (Think Dorothy in a nightmarish Oz, especially when a scarecrow comes to life.) Meanwhile, as Lucy Maud and Kevin set out together to look for their daughter, they struggle individually with their complex, unresolved relationship. If the storm is an omen of the climate risk the world currently faces, the dead cellphones beleaguering the characters represent communication breakdown on a deeper scale. Dinan breaks up the narrative with short, educational, sometimes didactic sections that illuminate the title by defining flash floods, bemoaning climate change, and explaining gold mining, among other topics.
By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.
