A review by bjr2022
The New Inheritors by Kent Wascom

4.0

I understand from the book’s blurb that this is one of a quartet of books about a family and American history of the Gulf Coast. And The New Inheritors feels like a part of a larger work because it’s sprawling, with large sections that don’t at first obviously connect in the way of novels with one main story. For instance, the first character, Isaac, whose history starts the book—with a mother who brings him into a cult and a harrowing escape with another woman which leads to his life in an adoptive family almost feels like a false start to a novel which is not about Isaac at all, because it goes from there to another family’s saga. I waited to see if the book would circle back to Isaac, a man who was “born full of animals,” and the whole intriguing opening, and the walk was so long through other characters’ lives that I began to worry it never would. But I should have trusted author Kent Wascom.

Toward the end I realized that the “long walks” were true to the way it really is with estranged family members, and I began to appreciate what I was reading on another level: this is a history of life itself that is told through specific people, during a specific long segment of time (early 1900s to 1961), in a specific region of the Americas.

The writing is so good and musical that the story holds you if you trust the serpentine wandering. This is less a novel than a history that probably takes the whole quartet of books to tell. I’m not sure I’ll read the other books, but I admire Wascom’s writing and applaud his enormous undertaking.