What You Have Left

Will Allison's debut novel tells of a family splintered and repaired. Three narrators tell the story of Holly, whose father dropped her at her grandfather's dairy farm at age 5, when her mother died. It's also the story of her grandfather, Cal, who raised her, and her father, Wylie, who took a lifetime to find his way back to his family. The use of three narrators aids this sprawling, meandering story as it travels back and forth in time and voice. Angela Rogers gives voice to Holly, using the straightforward, unemotional voice of one whose past abandonments have made her wary of emotional connections. Jonathan Hogan and Joseph Collins employ a similar tone in their narrations of the rest of the story. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Starred review from April 9, 2007
Loss and redemption take center stage in story writer Allison's beautifully written debut novel. When five-year-old Holly's mother dies suddenly in the summer of 1976, Holly's father, Wylie, leaves her in the care of her grandfather, Cal, and disappears. Holly's coming-of-age on her grandfather's South Carolina dairy farm is a turbulent one, producing a volatile woman with drinking and gambling problems. She does manage, however, to land a good husband in Cal's contractor, Lyle, and the two have a daughter. Meanwhile, Wylie drinks himself close to death and works odd jobs, while Cal endures the deaths of his wife and daughter with stoic dignity. But an Alzheimer's diagnosis proves too much to bear, leaving Cal to put his affairs in order before making an early, quiet exit. It's more than 15 years later before Holly and Wylie reunite, providing the deeply felt emotional core of this earnest novel. Characters' tension-fraught relationships are well played, and Allison is adept at navigating a labyrinthine web of psychological underpinnings. Though the structure has its stymied moments (chapters are chronologically jumbled and are told in various voices, narrative styles and tenses), the nonlinear narrative gives Allison a trove of angles, and he nails all of them.