Review of Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u201cYou know what happens during a normal rain? . . . Everybody stays home. They sit on their couch with a blanket and a frozen pizza and they watch TV. They don\u2019t all go out in it and disappear.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Eighteen-year-old Boyd has always been a little different, \u201clike the forked stick of a dowser, positioned over dry earth, turned not to water, but to pain.\u201d She is an extreme empath whose (sometimes unwanted) telepathic gifts allow her to know things she should not, and now, the Earth itself is trying to communicate. The Texas Hill Country is suffering from extreme drought in the summer of 2015, \u201ceven the oldest of the old-timers agree\u201d that it\u2019s the \u201cleading edge of the apocalypse.\u201d Towns drowned when the river was dammed to create the chain of Highland Lakes are re-emerging. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Boyd is beginning another summer of panning for gold on her family\u2019s little spit of beach on Lake Marble Falls with her best friend (and maybe-boyfriend\u2014it\u2019s complicated), Isaac, and looking forward to her grandfather\u2019s wedding during Memorial Day weekend. But as storm clouds unleash, Boyd knows Isaac is in danger from an epic flood, during which \u201cthe trees had taken in travelers, like medieval monasteries opening doors,\u201d and she sets out to rescue him. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/a> <\/em>is the debut novel from Texan Nancy Wayson Dinan, former managing editor for Texas Tech University\u2019s literary journal, <\/span><\/span>Iron Horse<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/a>, and current teacher and PhD student at Tech. Taking as inspiration what will become known as the historic Central Texas Memorial Day Flood of 2015, Dinan, among visitations animal, vegetable, mineral, and ghost, concocts a bittersweet brew of magical realism and environmental elegy.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The narrative is a relay told by Dinan\u2019s quirky cross section of Hill Country natives, big-city escapees, and iconoclasts: Boyd; Carla, aspiring good-witch and follower of snakes; ambitious Isaac, aspiring to the bourgeoise and \u201cmultiple sets of sheets,\u201d far from his Texas-history-teaching, Maximillian\u2019s-treasure-hunting father, Ruben; a commune set on the banks of the Colorado River; and Sleeping Beauty, among others.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Each chapter is preceded by an eponymous couple of pages of Hill Country history and lore, introducing the main themes and conflicts following. Dinan\u2019s subtle foreshadowing is like a tiny Hill Country crossroads\u2014blink and you will miss it. Pacing mirrors time in the novel, which is relative\u2014sometimes racing like the Blanco River, sometimes elegiac like Hill Country summers, sometimes merging through a wormhole as saber-toothed cats, nineteenth-century German settlers, and Boyd converge in the continuum. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Things You Would Know <\/span><\/span><\/em>is a timely novel of portents and omens for the climate change-viral dystopia we are inhabiting, disclosing how thin our veneer of civilization. If fiction can help us learn to live new realities, then this is a good place to begin.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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