Reading List: Reckoning with Rural Pasts
While we often associate springtime with the pristine newness of fresh starts, the season’s tumultuous storms and erratic temperatures reminds me of the effort required for that renewal. The books on this list are full of characters whose hopes for the future depend on their ability to reckon with challenging legacies that define both people and places. Their stories invite us to find purpose in discomfort and to recognize that the potential of the future relies on the work of the present.
The Rural Review will be taking a few weeks to regroup and plan for the year ahead, so in the meantime, we hope some of these book recommendations make it on your summer reading lists! We’ll be back soon with more of the latest rural-related research, news, events, and commentary.
The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson (Dakota) (Milkweed, 2021)
“For the past twenty-two years,” Rosalie Iron Wing observes at the novel’s start, “I have lived on a farm that once belonged to the prairie.” After the death of her Dakota father, Rosalie was told she had no relatives and placed in foster care. But like the farmland, Rosalie knows she does not belong to the community in which she resides—not to her white husband’s family, whose great-great-grandfather participated in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, nor to the white town that views her as a disruption to their celebrated history of settlers triumphing over “savages.” Finding her identity requires navigating her own history of suffering and loss and eventually that of her Dakota ancestors. But a story about seeds is also a story about hope, and by restoring connections previously lost to tragedy, Rosalie is able to find a sense of belonging.
Shelterbelts by Jonathan Dyck (Conundrum Press, 2022)
Through a series of interconnected vignettes featuring small but significant moments in the lives of individual characters living in a rural, Mennonite town in southern Manitoba, this debut graphic novel centers on a community struggling to negotiate its identity. Long-simmering tensions boil over when a new, non-denominational megachurch with a charismatic leader prompts the pastor and congregants of the established but dwindling Mennonite church to face difficult questions of inclusivity, military support and religious pacifism, land usage, and censorship. Uncertain and often at odds, the characters look to the past for answers that elude them in the present, only to find their history an unreliable arbiter of what was and should be. Compassionate but unwilling to provide easy answers and readymade heroes, Shelterbelts lingers in the quiet, uneasy moments of introspection at the core of the work of reconciliation.
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow (Tor, 2023)
Despite being a modern gothic fantasy, Harrow’s latest novel, set in the fictitious coal town of Eden, Kentucky, is very much grounded in the realities of Appalachia. Though Eden’s residents attempt to elide the historical violence and present traumas that saturate their identity, the town’s rotten core means every home—from the motel where the protagonist, Opal, tries to scrape by to the looming manor house occupied by a reclusive descendant of a once powerful family—has been built on unstable foundations. Footnotes throughout the text underscore the distance between history and truth, often undermining the veracity of what characters believe they know. Opal’s precarity does not allow her to shelter in the comfortable narratives that insulate her neighbors, and eventually her need for a home and Eden’s need for reckoning compels the town to confront the painful legacies that, left unacknowledged, threaten their shared futures.