cover image TENNANT'S ROCK

TENNANT'S ROCK

Steve McGiffen, . . St. Martin's, $22.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-312-26657-8

Set in California's Sacramento Valley in 1866, McGiffen's believably bleak first novel follows the travails of a cruelly mistreated young woman. Though she is not yet 20, Sissy has two children by Swann, a brutal and abusive man who in every instance save the legal one has taken Sissy as his wife. All four live with Sissy's mother, Ma, on the farm Ma's late husband left to her. When Sissy's brother, Nate, fresh from spending 10 years in jail for killing their father and then fighting for the Union in the Civil War, returns home to reclaim what he considers to be his farm, Sissy's world is upturned. The story Nate tells his younger sister about the death of their father couldn't be more different from the one their mother tells, and Sissy doesn't know whose version to believe. Soon she begins to meet Nate late at night on nearby Tennant's Rock, where she learns from him not only the horrors of prison and of war but also how to read. As time passes, she comes to trust him, only to experience another in her familiar string of painful disappointments. Though leavened by occasional glimpses of Ma's dark humor, McGiffen's debut is a brooding affair, a lesser version of Cormac McCarthy's early novels. The well-worn gun-against-gun, who-shot-who ending, one common to countless films and television dramas, is truly a disappointment, only somewhat offset by the novel's denouement, when Sissy is able to look back at her life and make some semblance of sense from all she has done and, more importantly, all she has had done to her. (July)