Riverine

Starred review from June 6, 2016
Combining lyrical prose with a haunting narrative, Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize–winner Palm recounts a story filled with secret longings, family history, and musings on what might have been. Raised in rural Indiana alongside the flood-prone Kankakee River, Palm dreamed of escaping to a wider world populated with more opportunities. Palm eventually does depart for college and later makes a home in Vermont. But the pull back to the Midwest is strong, and nagging questions persist. As a youngster, the author was secretly in love with her next-door neighbor. But their routes diverged with Palm making a new life for herself, first in Indianapolis and later in Vermont, while her neighbor ends up serving a life sentence for murder. Palm probes deeply into the family and small-town stories, which instilled such a deep sense of place in the author. She becomes fascinated with theories of criminal justice—taking college classes on the subject, reading local police blotters, and watching crime shows on television to better understand the how and why of what happened to her friend. All in all, this is a memoir to linger over, savor and study. Agent: Lana Popovic, Chalberg & Sussman.

Starred review from June 15, 2016
The haunting account of how the author tried to escape her rural Indiana past. Ink + Lead Literary Services owner Palm (Please Do Not Remove: A Collection Celebrating Vermont Literature and Libraries, 2014) grew up in a community claimed from the waters of the Kankakee River, which had been rerouted to create farmland. Early on she realized that she was not like other blue-collar "rural folk" whose lives entwined with the land; rather, she was a "bookish fishergirl who longed for the social opportunities of a cookie-cutter subdivision." Unable to move past the narrow confines of her social and physical isolation, Palm first sought refuge in religion. She experimented with both Christian and non-Christian faiths and belief systems; eventually, meditation became her one reliable way "out of that riverbed." While the author embraced the power of her mind and imagination to rise above an existence measured by cycles of flood and drought, fellow outsider--and secret object of desire--Corey sank into the "rot" of riverine life by "rejecting school and authority" and becoming a convicted murderer. Deeply troubled by Corey's descent into criminality but determined to break free of the muddy quicksand of river life, Palm, whose own uncle had been imprisoned for attempted murder, went to college and studied criminal justice. Her path took her first to Indianapolis and then, after marriage, to Vermont. Yet despite the distance she put between her riverbed upbringing and the trauma of Corey's lifetime incarceration, both remained with her. Only after she was able to return to Indiana to visit Corey in prison could she make peace with her past and a heart that, according to her corresponding palm line, looked like "an aerial cartography of the river where we grew up." Densely symbolic, unsentimental, and eloquent, Palm's book explores the connections between yearning, desire, and homecoming with subtlety and lucidity. The result is a narrative that maps the complex relationships that exist between individual identity and place. An intelligent, evocative, and richly textured memoir.

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June 1, 2016
Palm's Riverine is aptly subtitled a memoir from anywhere but here. Growing up in rural Indiana on land that was once the Kankakee River, she feels disconnected. Even her home is between two townsher parents pay taxes to one, but she goes to school in the other. Learning of this peculiar bifurcation, young Angela thinks, Nobody wants us, that notion informing the rest of the book. She has difficulty finding her place in the world, and the one person she feels connected to, Corey, the boy next door, ends up in prison yet continues to remain a constant for her. She obsesses over their unrequited love and wonders how she still sees him as a good man even after the things he has done. In deliberate yet beautiful prose, Palm recounts how her childhood, even the land itself, has affected her. The book feels disjointed at times, a collection of essays rather than a memoir, but the individual pieces deliver moving meditations on how memories continue to affect one's ever-changing personality, however far away we may move.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)