Falling to Earth (Southwood) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Kate Southwood has written an absolutely gorgeous—and completely modern—first novel about the great tornado of 1925. She has plainly modeled her fictional town, Marah, on the devastated Murphysboro, Ill., where 234 people died, and she has drawn freely on period newspapers and survivors' accounts. But in an act of wonderfully independent imagination, she has concentrated the narrative of Falling to Earth on Paul and Mae Graves, the only couple in Marah whose house is untouched, whose children are safe, who lose nothing while everyone else loses everything.... Southwood's beautifully constructed novel, so psychologically acute, is a meditation on loss in every sense.
Margaux Fragoso - New York Times


What's most exciting about Southwood's debut is her prose, which is reminiscent of Willa Cather's in its ability to condense the large, ineffable melancholy of the plains into razor-sharp images.
Daily Beast


Natural disasters are capricious and cruel, leaving some to sort through rubble while others sit comfortably by. In Southwood’s fine debut, a 1925 tornado devastates the small town of Marah, Ill., touching everyone—except for one family. On the day of the storm, the Graves children are at home, sick, their house untouched as the school collapses. Their father, Paul, holds tightly to a pole at his lumber yard, the only other building to escape unscathed.... [T]he community’s feelings of awe toward the lucky family gradually turns to envy as Paul sells lumber to those rebuilding, benefiting from their misfortune. Southwood grounds abstract notions of faith, community, luck, and heritage in the conflicted thoughts of her distinct and finely realized characters.
Publishers Weekly


Her vivid descriptions of the Tri-State Tornado and the carnage left in its wake are so gripping that they will leave readers breathless...Readers looking for an emotionally true work of historical fiction will enjoy the complexity of the characters and their relationships.
BookPage


A tornado destroys a Midwestern town, and one family is left unscathed, only to find their troubles just beginning.... Despite the fact that the Graves family is humble, unassuming and the opposite of smug, it gradually becomes apparent that everyone else in town resents their good fortune.... By the time Paul finally realizes that he can't reverse the senseless scapegoating, it is too late: His family's sheer politeness and unwillingness to confront their detractors or one another will be their undoing. Unfortunately, all the conflict avoidance saps the novel of forward momentum, not to mention that essential ingredient of drama: the struggle against fate. A relentlessly bleak exposé of human failings with no redemptive glimmer in sight.
Kirkus Reviews