Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
“This strange brew of a book nods to the picaresque novel, is shot through with magical realism, and undergirded by a naturalist’s concern for Mother Earth-and it’s all wrapped in lovely sentences. Book groups will have field days discussing this.”
“Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here is proof that the finest American novelist of her generation has taken the stage. Nancy Wayson Dinan has created a Texas drought, a hundred years flood, and characters so real we can’t help but fall in love with them, no matter what might happen next.”
— Dennis Covington, author of Salvation on Sand Mountain, a National Book Award finalist
“Dinan’s first novel takes a mildly numinous, not so mildly pre-apocalyptic approach in following the lives of a young Texas Hill Country teenager and her loved ones as they fight to find each other, or at least survive, in their suddenly devastated landscape…By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.”
― Kirkus
“A harrowing debut that pulls you down into a central Texas underworld, a place where the soil is deep with myth and injustice. When a flood sweeps over the countryside like the eve of the apocalypse, shattering already fractured families, ghosts rise with the river to collect history’s due. Dinan’s novel will drown you with beauty and grief.”
― Micah Dean Hicks, Author of BREAK THE BODIES, HAUNT THE BONES
“[A] glorious debut novel [with] a complex collection of themes: feminine power, the horrors of climate change, the destruction of land and the power of memory. … Dinan’s debut is a tragedy, but also a memorialization, a way to capture what has been lost, to immortalize the land she loves, and to save history from being drowned in the flood of human error.”
“In this astonishing debut novel, dream and dread and hope braid into a single, unforgettable tale: what happened when the flood came that changed everything. Part adventure story, part elegy for a planet that Nancy Wayson Dinan mourns with rich and unsentimental comprehension, Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here explores love and loss and the limits of those things in our lives. It washes away old boundaries and creates a world that is new, slightly menacing, and thrilling.”
— Erin McGraw, author of The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard
“Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here is fabulous and engrossing, both faithful to the real-world details of central Texas and wildly imaginative, peopled with treasure hunters, prehistoric beasts, distracted professors and one improbable young woman facing a momentous decision. Dinan’s storytelling flows as forcefully as a flash flood in this spellbinding first novel in which a handsome young man, refreshingly, awaits rescue by a powerful woman.”
“Things You Would Know 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.”
“Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here, Nancy Wayson Dinan. A young woman with a magical sense of empathy journeys across an almost fantastical Texan landscape, looking for her friend who disappeared during the Memorial Day floods of 2015. I loved this book; it vividly depicts a stunning Texas teeming with life, memories, and ghosts. Read my mini-review here.”
― Medium
“You’ll find “Things You Would Know if You Grew Up Around Here” in the fiction section, but this debut novel from a doctoral candidate in fiction writing at Texas Tech is something more than that. An imagined story, sure, but it all takes place during a real-world event — the Memorial Day floods of 2015 in west-central Texas. There’s more than a little of Salman Rushdie’s magical realism at play, as ghosts wander through the mist, scarecrows walk and vines reclaim the landscape.”
— Rob Merrill Associated Press
The “here” in the title of Austin native Nancy Wayson Dinan’s Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here(Bloomsbury, May 19) is the Texas Hill Country—specifically, that idyllic, rough-hewn region as it stands in the aftermath of 2015’s historic Memorial Day floods. … Periodic descriptions of the sorts of “things” that the title refers to—flash floods, the mythical lost San Saba mine, the tradition of painting a patch of fence post purple to ward off trespassers—add still more texture to Dinan’s detailed portrait of a part of Texas whose novelistic potential few authors have tapped.
― Emily McCullar Texas Monthly
“Dinan’s beautiful prose focuses on the specifics of Texas history and lessons gleaned from larger human stories. … Will our own fatal traumas play out as ghosts in the planet’s future? Who will find our “hunger stones,” our homestead oaks?”
“Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here is a cautionary fairy tale for our troubled ecological age. Dinan maps her version of the Texas Hill Country in such vivid and gorgeous detail that no matter the dangers her intrepid characters face readers will thrill to explore it. From arroyos turned rapids, to ‘vivified’ gardens, to echoes of its prehistoric past, Boyd, Lucy Maud, and Carla navigate a landscape grown hostile to the human hosts who failed to protect it. Precise and full-hearted, reverently attentive to the natural world, and woven through with subtle magic, Nancy Wayson Dinan has reinvented the Western for our newest frontier: the approaching end of the Anthropocene. Like the cataclysmic storm that sets this book in motion, Dinan’s stunning debut will carry readers clean away.”
— Katie Cortese, author of Make Way for Her and Other Stories and Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories