Kin

April 5, 2021
Rodenberg counters the “hopelessly incomplete and exploitative” narratives that commonly come out of Appalachia with a vivid coming-of-age account of her own. As a child, Rodenberg lived in an end-times religious community called “The Body,” where she was sexually abused. When she was 10, in 1984, after her grandfather gave her father a piece of land to build on, her family moved to the hills of eastern Kentucky. She became a cheerleader and a runner in high school with the encouragement of her father, who knew it to be true that “Shawna gets in trouble when she’s not busy.” (He was also worried, Rodenberg writes, that he would “catch me with my pants down.”) This kind of disparaging rhetoric followed Rodenberg into college, unsurprisingly affecting her grades. Even her adviser brushed her off with the startling question, “Do you want to be a bimbo your whole life?” Lacking direction and confidence, she got pregnant and reluctantly agreed to a shotgun wedding at age 19. While there isn’t much of a denouement, Rodenberg’s narrative is sobering and wisely avoids the cliches and stereotypes common to similarly themed memoirs. This engrossing series of dispatches offers a humanizing take on an Appalachia not often seen.

April 9, 2021

Essayist Rodenberg (English, Big Sandy Community and Technical Coll.) shares her story of growing up in Appalachia, spanning from before her birth until her early twenties. Rodenberg spent her early childhood years as part of a religious community called the Body, where she experienced sexual abuse from a church elder. When her family moved to eastern Kentucky, she constantly felt alienated from her peers due to her religious upbringing and economic status. Her relationship with her father was contentious and often resulted in Rodenberg experiencing verbal and physical abuse; but with the women in her family Rodenberg found acceptance. She enrolled in college but faced numerous obstacles, causing her to drop out, and an unplanned pregnancy led her into a loveless marriage. Throughout the memoir, Rodenberg juxtaposes her stories with those of earlier generations of her family as a way of exploring how actions of the past manifest in the present. VERDICT Rodenberg writes with an evocative and unflinching style, despite sometimes jarring shifts in narrative. This is a richly nuanced portrait of people and place, along with the bounds of forgiveness. Good for biography readers eager to explore the complexities of family relationships, or readers interested in women's lives in Appalachia.--Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2021
After growing up initially off the grid in a restrictive fundamentalist Christian community in northern Minnesota and then in a small former coal town in the hills of eastern Kentucky, Rodenberg has plenty of material for a fascinating memoir. What makes this one special is the way the debut author widens her view to tell the stories of her parents, grandparents, and other relatives, including times before she was born, with as much compassion and realistic detail as she gives her own story. For her conflicted and deeply unhappy father, for example, she writes of episodes from his rough childhood and shares many letters he sent home from Vietnam. These experiences don't justify his cruel and physically abusive behavior toward her, but they place it in a broader context, as she observes how ""instead of following in alcoholic, workaholic footsteps, he made religion his primary vice."" Rodenberg avoids the ""Mountain-Dew-mouth and dirt-floor stereotypes"" through which Appalachia is often seen to create a nuanced portrait of a complicated place and people.

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Starred review from April 15, 2021
A powerful and surprising story of an Appalachian childhood. Rodenberg opens with a scene in 2017, when she was "acting as an ambassador" for a TV crew eagerly hunting for "Mountain-Dew-mouth and dirt floor stereotypes" for a segment about her Eastern Kentucky hometown, "often as inscrutable and inaccessible to outsiders as a war-torn third-world country." In between takes, she surreptitiously darted to her aging parents' trailer for a quick errand. In the remainder of the book, she takes us on a journey that expands our understanding of these scenes. After her father returned from Vietnam in the early 1970s, he moved his young family to Minnesota, where they spent a few years in a rural Christian commune before moving back to the area where he was raised. Throughout, the author's densely detailed writing style makes for engrossing reading. On her grandmother's grooming routine: "She rubbed her hands with grease when she did housework, to keep them soft and young-looking. She steamed her face each night with a fresh hot rag, wiped it with Pond's, then Oil of Olay." A childhood game: "We played veterinarian with stray cats and dogs, pulling wolf worms from their necks with matches and tweezers and engorged ticks from the clusters on their backs, stomping and smearing the ticks in to red swirls across the blacktop; when we ran out of ticks we stomped clusters of poke berries to finish our pictures." The story continues through her teenage years: "I won't say that being punished for things I hadn't yet done made me want to do them, but it definitely finalized my plans." This is a bountiful, sometimes haunting story, but Rodenberg's structural choices may deter some readers. Her first-person story is told in a sometimes-confusing order, interrupted by novelistic third-person sections recounting the early lives of her parents and other relatives. This approach doesn't always work, but it's a minor quibble for an important memoir. Rodenberg's depth of feeling, intelligence, and love open eyes and demolish stereotypes.

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