Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

March 15, 2020
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.

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Starred review from February 15, 2020
In Dinan's debut, a drought in Texas Hill Country is broken by three days of torrential rains and subsequent flooding. Rivers roil, and people disappear into them. Empath Boyd knows that her future with Isaac is uncertain; they want different things from life. But when he disappears during the flood, she sets off to rescue him and is pulled into a strange, looping underworld. Most of Dinan's characters get separated from one another, except for Boyd's mother, Lucy Maud, and her soon-to-be ex-husband. Ruben, Isaac's father, has already (literally) fallen prey to stories of buried treasure when the storm hits and he's wedged into a mine shaft. Hippie-ish neighbor Carla sees the flood as a sign to "awaken the serpent"; instead, a snake bite awakens her to new possibilities for connection. Rivers and trees teem with displaced snakes and long-extinct animals; the thin veil between this world and the next has been rent. The long-dead line riverbanks and tramp trails. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)