A review by shelfimprovement
Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash
3.0
I really love reading good Appalachian fiction. I have very strong Appalachian roots, and sometimes it’s nice to get away from more metropolitan kind of stories and to be reminded of the very specific cultural quirks that I miss. I feel like Ron Rash should really scratch that itch of mine (no pun intended), and so I jumped at the chance to snag an ARC, but this really came up short for me.
Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Above the Waterfall is about Les, a sheriff on the brink of retirement, and Becky, his park ranger lady friend with a troubled past and a very specific sense of obligation. The two find themselves on opposite sides of each other when Les must investigate an act of environmental terrorism that is not what it seems to be on the surface.
I think the reason this book didn’t have enough oomph for me is that the character development – Becky in particular – felt kind of ham-fisted and incomplete. Becky came to North Carolina to escape a childhood trauma and the memory of a bad relationship with a violent man, but I don’t think her background was woven in to the present-day tale in a successful manner. I often found myself reading about her emotional struggles as a younger woman and thinking, “What does this have to do with the price of potatoes?” I didn’t feel like it informed her actions in the face of the crime – it didn’t tell me why she was doing what she was doing, and I never really felt like I understood her sense of obligation to Gerald. Rash wanted to draw a connection between Gerald and Becky’s former beau, to force us to question her judgment, but that connection felt kind of forced and inauthentic to me. And the stuff with the personal trauma – which Rash keeps a little more shrouded in mystery – did zero to help me understand Becky within the context of the main action of the book.
Though I was reading this on an eight-hour transatlantic flight, so it's possible that I wasn't reading as carefully as I should have been?
If Becky had received less focus, I might have enjoyed this book a lot more. I liked reading Les’s perspective as the kind of sheriff who is willing to take kickbacks from pot dealers to deal with his county’s meth problems but who is also willing to consider the Appalachian sense of pride and obligation when dealing with criminal matters. He is very much in tune with his community and he is a very specific type of flawed that we may have seen before but didn’t feel too clichéd. His investigation was full of twists and turns that were occasionally predictable and yet intriguing.
Ultimately, I felt like this book was a little phoned-in. It was by no means a bad book and I’m sure there are many other readers who will enjoy it quite a bit, but to me, even its deepest depths felt rather shallow and that was kind of disappointing.
Set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Above the Waterfall is about Les, a sheriff on the brink of retirement, and Becky, his park ranger lady friend with a troubled past and a very specific sense of obligation. The two find themselves on opposite sides of each other when Les must investigate an act of environmental terrorism that is not what it seems to be on the surface.
I think the reason this book didn’t have enough oomph for me is that the character development – Becky in particular – felt kind of ham-fisted and incomplete. Becky came to North Carolina to escape a childhood trauma and the memory of a bad relationship with a violent man, but I don’t think her background was woven in to the present-day tale in a successful manner. I often found myself reading about her emotional struggles as a younger woman and thinking, “What does this have to do with the price of potatoes?” I didn’t feel like it informed her actions in the face of the crime – it didn’t tell me why she was doing what she was doing, and I never really felt like I understood her sense of obligation to Gerald. Rash wanted to draw a connection between Gerald and Becky’s former beau, to force us to question her judgment, but that connection felt kind of forced and inauthentic to me. And the stuff with the personal trauma – which Rash keeps a little more shrouded in mystery – did zero to help me understand Becky within the context of the main action of the book.
Though I was reading this on an eight-hour transatlantic flight, so it's possible that I wasn't reading as carefully as I should have been?
If Becky had received less focus, I might have enjoyed this book a lot more. I liked reading Les’s perspective as the kind of sheriff who is willing to take kickbacks from pot dealers to deal with his county’s meth problems but who is also willing to consider the Appalachian sense of pride and obligation when dealing with criminal matters. He is very much in tune with his community and he is a very specific type of flawed that we may have seen before but didn’t feel too clichéd. His investigation was full of twists and turns that were occasionally predictable and yet intriguing.
Ultimately, I felt like this book was a little phoned-in. It was by no means a bad book and I’m sure there are many other readers who will enjoy it quite a bit, but to me, even its deepest depths felt rather shallow and that was kind of disappointing.