The New York Times Book Review - Ann Leary
Meghan Kenny's debut novel, The Driest Season, grew out of her award-winning 2005 short story of the same title. This resulting quiet but satisfying novel about a long, hard summer expands her original raw, exquisite portrait of a girl in crisis into a broader examination of American adolescent anxiety and grief, contextualized by devastating global conflict…Not every great short story is the seed of a great novel, but Kenny by and large succeeds…Kenny reveals, with a clarity so delicate it is sometimes painful, the human reaction to trauma…Cielle's gradual awakening and maturation are made all the more visceral thanks to Kenny's faith that her reader is as acutely perceptive as her beguiling young heroine.
Publishers Weekly
11/20/2017
Kenny’s debut novel is a frustratingly tentative coming-of-age narrative set on a Wisconsin farm during World War II. Cielle is almost 16 when she finds her father’s body hanging in the barn following his suicide, and the novel follows her family through their period of mourning: Cielle, her sister, and her mother try to make sense of what happened, while also determining how exactly their lives will change in the wake of the tragedy. The farm is actually owned by a local landlord and leased to the family, and since Cielle’s father’s suicide means they have contractually foregone their rights to it, much of the novel’s tension involves the family’s attempts to keep the true cause of death a secret and pretend it was accidental in order to save the farm. Young men close to Cielle enlist in the war effort, disappearing just like her father, and her feelings of destabilization in this time of uncertainty are palpable and heartfelt. But her epiphanies throughout feel forced, and the supporting characters seem to exist only to fulfill specific narrative purposes. The story arrives at its logical conclusion mostly by refusing to detour into more complicated terrain. (Feb.)
Robert Olmstead
"The Driest Season marks the arrival of a new writer with talent, intention, and a story to tell. The words are spare, beautiful, poetic, even prayerful. They hold you inside your chest where lies your heart and the place you breathe. A brilliant debut."
Josh Weil
"The Driest Season settled over me like weather: sweeping in, wholly immersive, charged with coming change. In clear-eyed, chiseled prose that perfectly captures her novel’s hard-worn world and the powerful emotions churning through its people, Meghan Kenny manages, with wisdom and tenderness, to grapple with some of the greatest struggles of the human heart: grief and the gathering of oneself out of its dust, love and the loss that is ‘a space like an empty piece of sky’ following young Cielle around. A lingering power that, long after the last page of this moving story, follows me too."
Ploughshares
"Precise and strong…The workmanlike nature of the prose beautifully echoes the land as well as the characters…[T]he book is about survival as much as it’s about grief and coming-of-age. What’s particularly wonderful here is how unsentimental this all is. Kenny is not interested in nostalgia, or in describing a world of the past where everything was simpler and, therefore, better."
Chris Offutt
"The Driest Season evokes the naive confusion of teenage years, particularly when tragedy strikes. Set in a rural community during the 1940s, this novel reminds us that human frailty, loyalty, and the yearning to understand life never goes away. The past was not better or safer. It’s where we all once were young."
Lin Enger
"It’s hard not to fall in love with Cielle Jacobson, the resilient fifteen-year-old girl at the center of this spare, searingly honest novel. Confronted with unspeakable loss, she discovers strengths of character that salvage a future for herself and her entire family. Meghan Kenny’s rural Wisconsin, circa World War II, is rendered with love and precision—its weather, landscapes, and people evoked in prose that echoes recent masters of the American heartland, David Rhodes and Marilynne Robinson."
Ann Leary
"Quiet but satisfying…Haunting…Kenny reveals, with a clarity so delicate it is sometimes painful, the human reaction to trauma."
Ramona Ausubel
"A searing debut. Meghan Kenny writes an almost unbearable moment in a young woman’s life with precision and tenderness, ache and hope. I was grateful for each page."
Booklist
"Quiet and moving…With a light touch, Kelly tells an impactful story of everyday lives in trying circumstances."
Library Journal
01/01/2018
Tragedy and loss visit the Wisconsin farm community of Boaz during a summer of oppressive drought, but all 16-year-old Cielle Jacobson knows is that her father is dead; she discovers him hanging in their barn. By the time the funeral takes place, she is confused why the story has changed. Her mother tells everyone he had an accident on the tractor—a necessary cover-up to keep their farm, as Cielle learns much later. Cielle treasures her father's crumpled suicide note, kept hidden until she's ready to read his last words, as other losses pervade the town. A tornado destroys the barn, sister Helen leaves for college, and the neighboring Olsen family denies the existence of a son recently returned from World War II with a shattered mind and an amputated leg. Despite the risk, Helen's fiancé joins the Army Air Corps, anxious to escape stifling Boaz and the obligations of their engagement. VERDICT Expanding an award-winning short story, debut novelist Kenny (Love Is No Small Thing: Stories) offers a moving tale of family secrets and heartache that brings to life a teenage girl's struggle for meaning and hope after devastating loss. A finely crafted novel deserving wide attention. [See Prepub Alert, 8/21/17.]—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-10-10
A father's death leaves a daughter seeking answers and a return to normal life in this impressive debut novel.It's mid-July 1943, amid a drought in Boaz, Wisconsin, when 15-year-old Cielle Jacobson finds her father hanging from a beam in their barn. Her mother and a neighbor cover up the suicide as an accident, adding to the questions shadowing Cielle, whose closeness to her father is revealed in brief, tender flashbacks. As the narrative moves through several weeks and vignettes, Kenny (Love Is No Small Thing: Stories, 2017) anchors her third-person narrative to Cielle's point of view. She is a gifted violinist, a loving sister, and a thoughtful teen who ponders her place in a small town and in the universe and feels her childhood "leaving little by little every day." The author offers little drama: a tornado that razes the barn; a horse-riding accident; a suicide note left unread for many pages; a subplot involving a wily Cielle and the suicide's effect on the legal disposition of the Jacobsons' land. Even the war is mostly an aside—Mrs. Jacobson alludes to "rationed butter and sugar"—until Cielle's sister learns that her boyfriend has joined up and a neighbor's injured son comes home in a wheelchair. But from the life-altering suicide to her first kiss, everything bears some significance for Cielle's progress toward adulthood. She calls to mind Frankie of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, who begins to think about the world during "a long queer season" one spring. And like Bunny in the double-edged opening of William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows, Cielle doesn't "waken all at once." Still, she begins to blossom despite the drought.Kenny's thoughtful, finely crafted work is an eloquent reminder that the breadth of a world matters less than the depth of a character.
