Beautiful prose, such vivid characters and such brutality. Reviews on Serena by Ron Rush is quite polarised. However, I loved it. Here’s my favourite lines from the book:
It’s a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start.
Don’t love anything that can be taken away.
She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be.
And darkness. You can’t see it no more than you can see air, but when it’s all around you sure enough know it.
Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the colour of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the colour of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.
Nothing is but what is now.
“It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes
It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did.
One thing’s sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children.
We want what’s in this world but we also want what ain’t.
Others can make us vulnerable and the sooner such vulnerabilities are dealt with the better.
A small profit it better than a big loss.
You men notice so little, Pemberton. Physical strength is your gender’s sole advantage.
We had some good times at school. I didn’t know how good those times was till I left, but I guess that’s the way of it.
She’d never known fear had a taste, but it did.
‘Don’t worry,’ Snipes said. ‘Another one’s always coming down the pike. That’s something all your historians and philosophers agree on. A feller over in Germany looks to be ready to set a match to Europe soon enough, and quick as they snuff him out there’ll be another to take his place.
Rachel felt the grief grow so wide and deep it felt like a dark fathomless pool she’d never emerge from. Because there was nothing left to do now, nothing except endure it.
But as Rachel watched the sheriff enter the front door, it was hard to believe the farmhouse itself was still there, because a place where something so terrible had happened shouldn’t continue to exist in the world. The earth itself shouldn’t be able to abide it.
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