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.
The New York Times Book Review - Ann Leary
11/20/2017
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Quiet but satisfying…Haunting…Kenny reveals, with a clarity so delicate it is sometimes painful, the human reaction to trauma."
"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."
"Quiet and moving…With a light touch, Kelly tells an impactful story of everyday lives in trying circumstances."
01/01/2018
★ 2017-10-10
