Inside the Wolf

A middle-aged academic reckons with her small Southern hometown in the lyrical but heavy-handed latest from Rowland (The Transcriptionist). Rachel Ruskin is having a terrible year. First, her older brother, Garland, dies by suicide, then she’s denied tenure for her research and writing on Southern folklore. Finally, her parents are killed in a car accident. She returns from New York City to the unincorporated village of Shiloh, N.C., to deal with the family tobacco farm, where she remembers a night 30 years earlier when she, Garland, and their best friend Rufus entered the woods with a gun and Rufus was accidentally killed. It’s long been the story that Garland held the gun, but like the myths Rachel studies, the truth is more complicated. Meanwhile, she struggles to write, focused on a “baggy shapeless article about metamorphosis as exile and escape, but also death.” While Rachel is home, the death of a five-year-old girl by a gun forces her to revisit her role in the earlier shooting. Though the tale of two shootings feels manufactured, there are some meaty insights on Rachel’s ambivalence about her roots (“The land lumps us together, like it or not,” she reflects). In Rowland’s simplistic if well-wrought world, perhaps one can go home again. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents. (July)