Name: Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky
ISBN: 9781937512200

David Connerley Nahm

In a novel of love, loss, ghost stories and small-town life in rural Kentucky, Leah, the director of a non-profit, is forced to revisit her childhood when a grown man arrives on her doorstep claiming to be the little brother who disappeared when she was young. Original.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Colton Ray

I haven't read a novel with this much atmosphere in a long time. The feeling of dread hangs over every page, propelling you forward even through the dense fog of words to the ending, which leaves the reader hanging suspensefully, waiting and wishing for some sense of closure that never comes. 

This is not a typical book, but rather a novel of memories. It takes patience to read; the first hundred pages or so is just a series of reminiscing about the golden light and dark shadows of childhood, the loves and cruelties of kids, the way they live tertiary to the adult world until their innocence is ground out by a single event or the slow death of time. Although I've never lived in Kentucky or had a brother go missing, hardly a page went by without me marveling at the way Nahm put into words feelings I've always had, or had but then forgot over the years. Each page is awash with some of the densest and most accurate imagery that manages to be beautiful in the face of an overhanging cloud that is trying to darken everything. 

The plot is actually fairly simple, regarding a woman whose young brother went missing as a child and the continuing effects this one event has had on the rest of her life. Grief, as illustrated here, is not sobbing, but numbness and disaffection. I'll be pondering this one for a while. An early contender for my favorite read of this year.

Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

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