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Follow Me (2009)

by Joanna Scott(Favorite Author)

3.14 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0316051659 (ISBN13: 9780316051651)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Little, Brown and Company

review 1: A disappointment, if you're--I'm--still looking for a "Manikin"-like experience. Scott does write beautifully again here, though. The fictitious Tuskee River maps the northward trajectory of the protagonist's life. Born Sally Werner to a backwoodsy, fanatically religious family, she is sort of raped by her cousin and gives birth to a boy she leaves in a basket on her parents' kitchen table and runs away. She's a dodgy gal of dubious moral distinction--never mind that she had the kid, dumping him and running is just the first of many decisions she attributes in her peculiar, self-justifying, prevaricating way to being swept along the river of Fate (she does--finally--briefly--question that notion). Rescued by a kind mountain family she then betrays by stealing the life savi... morengs of the sad old man who'd taken her in (but didn't he want her to have it? really? and after all, it's for the son she left behind), she becomes Sally Angel in another town, where she falls in love with a younger teenaged boy "Mole," who's killed after being run off the road by the loutish local rich kid who will become her next lover and the father of her second child, daughter Penelope. Long before the child is born, she'll have left loutish Benny sitting at a soda counter awaiting her return and reincarnated yet again in another town as Sally Mole. So it goes through the novel, till her final incarnation as Sally Bliss. Benny eventually knocks her teeth out and later gets her to rather casually sign over half-custody of Penelope (named after another friend who helped her that she'd never see again). She has a long-term affair with her attorney boss whose wife is going blind. They eventually marry. She destroys her daughter's happiness in, typically, somewhat good faith--having aided and abetted her blame-dodging relatives into making her fantasy real (with fake documentation) that the boy who's gotten her daughter pregnant is actually her long-lost son, so they can't be together. The boy will drunkenly fumble a suicide attempt and many years later discover the truth and get in touch with his daughter, Sally's namesake (who's apparently piecing this rather tall tale together into the present narrative--many hands at work fashioning Sally Werner's history). Her son, in fact, was beaten to death by his father while still an infant and buried in an unmarked grave--the entire family's motive for duplicity. Sally believes in magic fairy people who live in the river and sort of act as fate's angels...This plot strain--if it is one--never really takes off. Ultimately, I guess I consider it a good recommendation for the seemingly endless line of library patrons looking for books with a "strong woman character" (though I wouldn't want to look at that too closely...) and put it in the category of almost an adventure tale with Anderson's "Outlander" and Naslund's "Ahab's Wife." (There are no men of consequence in the multi-generational saga.)
review 2: This is a well written book that might resonate better with someone who likes to revel in the way it used to be. FGor some reason, things set in the 1050's abound and this is not one of those that rises to the top of the list for me. Sally is the star of the book--she gets involved with a fast and furious cousin, and ends up giving birth to a baby at age 16. She leaves him on the kitchen table, like a loaf of bread, and takes off. She works in upstate New York, which is where she is from, but she never hears a word from her family. It turns out, the reason is two-fold. One is that they do not frgive her--but the other is that something terrible happens to the baby and no one wants her to find out, or to get the law involved in looking into it. Sally sends money home to care for the baby, which her family gladly accepts, but never acknowledges or tells her to stop, which deepens the guilt around what happened. THe tragedy then begins (as if this wasn't bad enough) when Sally is led to believe that someone that her daughter is seeing romantically might be her other child. Oh dear... less

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