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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jun 2018, 320 pages
Paperback:
May 2019, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Dean Muscat
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Treeborne is a celebration and a reminder: of how the past gets mixed up in thoughts of the future; of how home is a story as much as a place.
Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time, she has become its keeper. A place where conquistadors once walked, and where the peaches they left behind now grow, Elberta has seen fierce battles, violent storms, and frantic change - and when the town is once again threatened from without, Janie realizes it won't withstand much more. So she tells the story of its people: of Hugh, her granddaddy, determined to preserve Elberta's legacy at any cost; of his wife, Maybelle, the postmaster, whose sudden death throws the town into chaos; of her lover, Lee Malone, a black orchardist harvesting from a land where he is less than welcome; of the time when Janie kidnapped her own Hollywood-obsessed aunt and tore the wrong people apart.
As the world closes in on Elberta, Caleb Johnson's debut novel lifts the veil and offers one last glimpse.
Stories We Tell
TODAY
The water was coming, but Janie Treeborne would not leave. She'd lived alone in this house perched on the edge of a roadside peach orchard in Elberta, Alabama, ever since Lee Malone sold it to her. Sold maybe not the right word for the price she paid, the price he would take. But it was hers and she would not leave. Rather the water take her too.
She'd been telling her visitor exactly how she came to own the house, which once was Lee's office and, before that, his boyhood home. A complicated matter. To tell how this house and the surrounding property became hers she needed to tell how it became Lee's, and to do that she needed to first tell about a man named Mr. Prince.
"See, back then folks thought Mr. Prince wasn't but a rumor and a last name," she continued. "But he was real. Lived in one of them mansions down on the river. Anyhow, Lee started working at The Peach Pit not long after the storm.
"Worked here for years. Then one day Mr. ...
At times Treeborne reads like a Southern Gothic novel by the numbers. This is a book of rattlesnakes and corn liquor, of a cursed backwoods family living on cursed backwater soil. Johnson appears to relish giving voice to the gross and grotesque. As such, a cynical reader may deem much of what's on offer as mere genre box-ticking. Thankfully, Johnson's fecund language – "The Seven more gorgeous than any piece of land she'd ever traipsed." – rooted in an earthy Southern vernacular render these somewhat hackneyed aesthetic points fresh and poetic...continued
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(Reviewed by Dean Muscat).
Alyson Hagy, author of Boleto Brad Watson, author of Miss Jane
Caleb Johnson is as much a prophet of his place and time as was Larry Brown of north Mississippi, as Cormac McCarthy of his native Knoxville, Tennessee, Marquez of his homegrown, fictional Macondo. He is 'Treeborne.' This is a novel born of a deep, affectionate, and wise knowledge of a place and its people, its history, and its rich and complicated wildness. And its innate tendency to recognize and heighten the mysterious and strange in the ordinary, everyday. He manipulates and maneuvers narrative masterfully. Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Stone Arabia
Treeborne is a remarkable first novel: poetic, funny, and populated by particular, fully alive characters. Caleb Johnson has a wonderful ear for the rhythm and diction of Southern voices. He knows how to light on just the right detail of place, time and person. Watching how the intertwined interests of the land, of the past, and of a family play out makes the novel compelling from start to finish. Daniel Wallace, national bestselling author of Extraordinary Adventures and Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions
I can't remember the last time I read a book I wish so much I'd written. Treeborne is beautiful, and mythic in ways I would never have been able to imagine...I can't say enough about this book. Daren Wang, author of The Hidden Light of Northern Fires
Caleb Johnson's writing makes you yearn for a place that never was. Elberta, Alabama is so vivid, so alive, you can smell the peaches ripening in the orchard. Jill McCorkle, New York Times bestselling author of Life After Life
In Treeborne, Caleb Johnson spins an artful, intricate web of a place - its rich history and memorable characters caught and held there by stories told and secrets withheld. Suspenseful and immensely satisfying. Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome
What a marvel of a novel this is. Treeborne's sentences are taut, its situations engrossing, its characters absolutely and indelibly engaging. Caleb Johnson's debut is a deep-dig, history-rich, story-soaked beauty. Rick Bragg, New York Times bestselling author of My Southern Journey and All Over but the Shoutin'
This boy cannot only write with beauty about how things are in the Deep South, he can write with an eerie feel for the way they used to be. I've heard a lot of great old editors say that you can't teach writing, that it's born. Caleb Johnson can make you believe it.Realizing her dreams of becoming a Hollywood actress are dwindling, Tammy Treeborne - a central protagonist in Treeborne - decides to indulge her passion for the movies in another way, by opening her very own drive-in theater in Elberta, Alabama.
The drive-in theater is an American icon, itself immortalized in countless classic movies (Grease, Twister) and songs (The Beach Boys' "Drive-In," David Bowie's "Drive-In Saturday").
The first patented drive-in was developed by Richard Hollingshead in New Jersey. It's said that Hollingshead was inspired to develop the idea for a different kind of movie theater to help his mother. As a somewhat large lady, Mrs. Hollingshead found the average indoor cinema seats restrictive and ...
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