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    Falling to Earth
    Falling to Earth
    Falling to Earth
    Ebook282 pages6 hours

    Falling to Earth

    By Kate Southwood

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A “poignant [and] powerful” novel about a 1920s Midwestern community in the aftermath of a devastating tornado (The New Yorker).

    In March 1925, the worst tornado in the nation’s history will descend without warning on the small town of Marah, Illinois. By nightfall, hundreds will be homeless and hundreds more will lie in the streets, dead or grievously injured. Only one man, Paul Graves, will still have everything he started the day with—his family, his home, and his business, all miraculously intact.

    This “absolutely gorgeous” novel follows Paul Graves and his young family in the year after the storm as they struggle to comprehend their own fate and that of their devastated town (The New York Times). They watch helplessly as Marah tries to resurrect itself from the ruins and as their friends and neighbors begin to wonder how one family, and only one, could be exempt from terrible misfortune. As the town begins to recover, the family miscalculates the growing resentment and hostility around them with tragic results, in an “extraordinarily moving” portrayal of survivor’s guilt and the frenzy of bereavement following a disaster (Financial Times).

    “All the big themes are here—chance, fate, loyalty, revenge, guilt, jealousy . . . Inspired by actual events surrounding the 1925 Tri-State tornado, the worst in U.S. history, Southwood’s poignantly penetrating examination of the psychic cost of survival is breathtaking in its depth of understanding.” —Booklist (starred review)

    “What’s most exciting about Southwood’s debut is her prose, which is reminiscent of Willa Cather’s in its ability to condense the large, ineffable melancholy of the plains into razor-sharp images.” —The Daily Beast
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 5, 2013
    ISBN9781609451103
    Falling to Earth
    Author

    Kate Southwood

    Kate Southwood received an M.A. in French Medieval Art from the University of Illinois, and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Program for Poets and Writers. Born and raised in Chicago, she now lives in Oslo, Norway with her husband and their two daughters. Falling to Earth is her first novel.

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    Reviews for Falling to Earth

    4.5/5

    38 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is a quiet masterpiece that's going to follow me around for a while, maybe for the rest of my life. It is about how a small town and then a family in a small town are destroyed by the aftermath of a deadly tornado. Note I say, the aftermath and not the storm itself. In the worst disasters it seems, there is radiation even when there isn't radiation. In this case it's big giant fuck you rays that permeate the flesh and spirit of the sole family that loses nothing and nobody in the storm. My mother was Illinois enough that I thought Chicago had an 'a' on the end of it well into elementary school. She always said small towns can be mean little places if they turn on you. And they don't let up until they get what they think you owe them. This is very well covered in this book without a single wasted word. It also captured perfectly that exotic midwestern thing where speech can become so eloquent and beautiful while hardly being used. This book is an exquisite lone tree. This book is the next summer's fireweed after a bad burn.
    • 5/5
      If I could give this beautiful novel six stars, I would do so. It's not that I think it will become a classic, but rarely has a novel so moved me. Set in a small Illinois town in 1925, this is the story of one family's experiences in the aftermath of a horrendous tornado. Paul and Mae, their three children, and Paul's mother Lavinia, are the only ones in town left unscathed by the storm. None of them was killed (or even injured!), their house is intact, and Paul's lumber business was completely unharmed. How the town and they themselves respond to this trick of fate provides the vehicle for Southwood's exquisite exploration of grief, mourning, and terrible rage in the face of death's incomprehensible capriciousness. Faith is lost or strengthened, homes and farms rebuilt or abandoned. And the impact of our need to blame, to scapegoat someone, is exposed in its raw humanity. Southwood's characters became real for me in the manner of the best fictional characters. And the landscape of the town, the sights and sounds and smells of the rural midwest, are integrated into the narrative with perfect pitch. Full disclosure: Kate Southwood was a friend of mine back in the late 1980s. We drank Irish whiskey together, discussing the state of the world deep into the evening with our group of friends. So I approached her novel with some trepidation. What if I hated it? Could I be objective? I can't fully answer the second question but I can say with deep honesty that, as I read the novel, I forgot that I knew the author. I didn't hear Kate's voice in the narrative and, though I certainly knew she was intelligent and interesting, I had no idea back then that she had something like this novel inside her, waiting to come out. I can, with a firm commitment to transparency and faith to the art of reading, recommend this novel enthusiastically and without reservation.
    • 5/5
      Crafted within a historical backdrop, this stunning debut literary novel explores a small town's mushrooming unbridled bitterness toward the one family left unscathed by a devastating unseasonable tornado. Psychologically astute and emotionally profound, this literary gem ends sadly with a tragically painful outcome.
    • 4/5
      March is not typically the time of year for tornadoes, but in Maran, Illinois on March 18th, 1925, the deadliest tornado to ever hit the United States devastated this small town. Tom and his family, will be the only family that has not lost anything. Children who were at school that day, houses, businesses all gone in a blink of an eye. The emotion and trauma at the beginning of this novel was intense, everyone who dies, men, woman, children, animals. grief stricken survivors. This was in the days before there was Fema, insurance payments, hotels, days when neighbors depended on neighbors, those with houses and food shared what they had. Red Cross arrives with tents, supplies, trains arrive with more and yet how does one rebuild when there is no money, no material. Tom who feels guilty at his good fortune, does what he can to ease the suffering, he owns a lumber mill and so he cuts wood for caskets. A tragedy of this nature brings out the good in some people and the bad in others. Looting only one outlet, jealousy another. Directed toward Tom and his family, why did they still have everything? It is not fair. This is not a long novel, and yet in contains so much. Study of tragedies, human nature, the will to survive and the ability to lie to ourselves, sometimes not wanting to see until it is too late.

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    Falling to Earth - Kate Southwood

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