Treeborne

April 1, 2018
A debut Southern novel, like many in that tradition, which is rooted in place, populated by eccentric characters, and filled with a certain amount of gothic weirdness.The narrative spans about 80 years and starts in the present day, when Janie Treeborne is being interviewed about her life and times. She lives alone in a house on the edge of a peach orchard in Elberta, Alabama, and she wants to tell how she acquired the house and how the history of her white family has been intimately entangled with the history of Elberta. She and her way of life are now being threatened by the destruction of the Hernando de Soto Dam, which has long served its purpose and is now threatening to give way. In lengthy and extended flashbacks to 1929, we learn about Hugh Treeborne, Janie's grandfather, who helped build the dam. And in another series of flashbacks to 1958, we're informed about the intermediate generation--especially Janie's father, Ren, and her Aunt Tammy, who had aspirations to go to Hollywood and become a movie star dating back to when she saw her first movie at the Elberta Rampatorium. The book has no central narrative thread but instead invites us to become acquainted with an odd cast of characters, both in and out of the Treeborne family, across three generations. Chief among these is Lee Malone, an African-American who formerly owned the peach orchard and also became the lover of Janie's grandmother (and Hugh's wife), Maybelle, and Ricky Birdsong, injured in both mind and body and attuned to seeing visions of Jesus. Johnson's prose can soar to poetic heights, though his language is always rooted in the Southern vernacular. In fact, even the third-person narrative voice speaks with a Southern accent. ("You could still do things thataway back then"; "Pud Ward got hisself a new haircut.")A lyrical effusion deeply rooted in place and steeped in quirky characters.

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Starred review from April 23, 2018
Using language rich as mulch, debut author Johnson tells the superb saga of three generations of Treebornes, who live near the town of Elberta in the southern reaches of Georgia. Janie Treeborne narrates much of the story, tripping through time beginning with the days of her grandaddy Hugh, forced by circumstance to join the Authority, behemoth builder of a modern dam. So as not to forget how things once were, Hugh becomes a maker of a strange art he calls “assemblies,” figures made of mud, spiders’ webs, and gears. His wife is Janie’s beloved MawMaw, the postmaster Maybelle; she is in love with Lee Malone, the “man with the blue arms” who sings like an angel and tends orchards as old as the conquistador Hernando DeSoto. When Janie’s aunt and uncle threaten to sell off and clear the ancient forest once home to her beloved grandparents, Janie and her friends kidnap her aunt to try to stop them, and she goes on the lam in the company of a magical doll made of dirt. Johnson’s pervasive use of the colloquial, even when narrating, never gets irritating. Metaphors abound, and it isn’t a coincidence the Treebornes’ town shares a person’s name; the whole place is as alive as if it walked on two feet. Sentence by loamy sentence, this gifted author digs up corpses and upends trees to create a place laden with magic and memory.

May 1, 2018

Shifting between the 1920s and contemporary times, Johnson's first novel peels back layers in the lives of three generations of the Treeborne family of dying Elberta, AL. Elderly Janie Treeborne, who's being interviewed by a young man, wants to record her life story. Her 700-acre family homestead, the Seven, will soon disappear underwater because the Hernando de Soto Dam is failing. Janie at first refuses to relocate. Her granddaddy Hugh worked on the dam in 1929 but secretly moved coffins to the Treeborne woods from an overlooked cemetery soon to be flooded. With Hugh's assemblies of mud, colored glass, and found objects, the Seven becomes a tourist attraction. His widow, Maybelle, dies suddenly, which throws suspicion on her lover, Lee Malone, a black orchardist never quite welcome in Elberta. As a child, Janie is bored and lonely, and her mischief extends to kidnapping her Hollywood-obsessed Aunt Tammy, a scheme that backfires horribly. Other quirky residents richly enhance Janie's tales, and through their stories, the full range of Elberta's offbeat history unfolds. VERDICT Johnson's gem of a novel tells of a place and its people so vivid and real that readers won't want their stories to end.--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO

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Starred review from April 15, 2018
Janie Treeborne was just a girl when the trouble happened, right after the Hernando de Soto Peach Days Festival during the summer of 1958. But she would turn out to play a central role in the disappearance and return of her aunt Tammy in the weeks that followed. In his debut novel, Johnson has conjured a stunning account of the Treeborne family of Elberta, Alabama, creating an immersive sense of both time and place as he probes the memories and resentments that linger among the town's residents over the course of decades. Tammy disappears only a short time after her mother, Maybelle, a white woman, was found dead in the woods on her 700-acre peach orchard. Suspicion quickly turns to Lee Malone, a black man who had a close friendship?and more?with Maybelle. The crises bring the ugliness simmering under the surface of the town to a boil, with repercussions that echo through the years that follow. Mysteries swarm around the Treebornes, all the way back to Janie's grandfather, a self-taught artist whose work building the dam near Elberta at the start of the Great Depression leads to a secret that he and Maybelle would bury together. Majestic in scope, jam-packed with revelations and a touch of the fantastical, Treeborne is an enthralling story about what binds people together and breaks them apart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)