Fallen Land
Taylor Brown, 2015
St. Martin's Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250077974
Summary
Fallen Land—Taylor Brown's debut novel—is set in the final year of the Civil War, as a young couple on horseback flees a dangerous band of marauders who seek a bounty reward.
Callum, a seasoned horse thief at fifteen years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land, leaving destruction in their wake.
Ava and Callum have only each other in the world and their remarkable horse, Reiver, who carries them through the destruction that is the South.
Pursued relentlessly by a murderous slave hunter, tracking dogs, and ruthless ex-partisan rangers, the couple race through a beautiful but ruined land, surviving on food they glean from abandoned farms and the occasional kindness of strangers.
In the end, as they intersect with the scorching destruction of Sherman's March, the couple seek a safe haven where they can make a home and begin to rebuild their lives. Dramatic and thrillingly written with an uncanny eye for glimpses of beauty in a ravaged landscape, Fallen Land is a love story at its core, and an unusually assured first novel by award-winning young author Taylor Brown. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 18, 1982
• Where—state of Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Georgia
• Currently—lives in Wilmington, North Carolina
Taylor Brown grew up on the Georgia coast. He has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of Western North Carolina.
His fiction has appeared in more than twenty publications, including the Baltimore Review, North Carolina Literary Review, and storySouth. He is the recipient of the Montana Prize in Fiction, and was a finalist in both the Machigonne Fiction Contest and the Doris Betts Fiction Prize.
An Eagle Scout, he lives in Wilmington, North Carolina. Fallen Land is his first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A] Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain... written in a vernacular that resurrects the era and fully brings alive Callum and Ava’s adventures on the road. At the center of the story is the couple’s growing love for each other, which powers the story to a suspenseful ending and a satisfying epilogue.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [T]he lawless days at the close of the Civil War. Young Callum...finds a lone girl named Ava and tries to save her from the brutish Colonel.... [Their] frantic journey toward a new life is full of danger.... A nail-biting journey from first page to last. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Drawing from the shadows of America's epic tragedy, the Civil War, Brown's debut novel offers a tale of endurance and love in the face of adversity.... Like McCarthy's Border Trilogy or Frazier's Cold Mountain, this is American literature at its best, full of art and beauty and the exploration of all that is good and bad in the human spirit.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Fallen Land:
1. What is the significance of the book's title, "Fallen Land"? Consider that the setting is immediately after America's brutal Civil War. How is that struggle reflected in the action of the book and, metaphorically, in the title?
2. Who seemed to commit the greater atrocities: Sherman's organized troops in his orchestrated "March to the Sea"? Or the disorganized bands of looters, who simply took advantage of the mayhem in the nearly defeated South, pillaging and plundering at will?
3. Talk about the two young characters, Callum and Ava. How would you describe them? What prompts Callum to risk all and return to Ava?
4. Reiver, the horse—he's almost mythical, as is the beauty of the land itself. What might Taylor Brown be getting at by pitting a magical steed and an almost "unearthly" natural setting against the brutality of humankind?
5. The young couple depends on the kindnesses of strangers. Talk about some of the characters who aided Callum and Ava along their journey.
6. Callum wonders, at one point, if something evil has implanted itself in him...
if something mean had slipped into him. Something vicious. For the first time, he touched the pale worm of scar growing along the side of his head, still tender above his dead ear.
Has he been corrupted by his association with the Colonel and his marauders? And why might the author have him touch his "still tender" scar? What's the symbolic meaning there?
7. Comparisons are being made between this book and both Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy and, especially, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Have you read any of those books? If so, what parallels exist between them and Taylor Brown's Fallen Land?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, feel free to use these LitLovers questions...online of off...with attribution. Thanks.)