Booktrope, January 27, 2016.
Four Stars
In 1970s rural Missouri, Pearl’s family is poor,
living off subsistence farming and her father’s hunting trips. The surrounding
land formerly belonged to the Osage people, but they have been run off the land
by agriculture and development. Pearl is thirteen-years-old, helping her mother
in the vegetable garden, when she experiences her first vision – an Osage woman
comes to her, bringing visions of the earth’s destruction through ecological
disaster. The vision is overwhelming for young Pearl, but it is terrifying for
her mother – she believes that Pearl will not be able to survive in a difficult
world because she feels so much, so strongly. Her reaction is to withdraw
emotionally. She does not hug her daughter, because “it isn’t done.”
Pearl feels everything deeper than most people, and
she expresses these feelings with a deep, visceral connection to the earth. She
has visions of the Osage people, but they really represent a sense of empathy
for all living things, including the land around her. Pearl soon learns that
her “mad” Aunt Nadine had the same gift – before she was sent for electroshock
treatment at the nearby mental asylum. Suffering abuse from her father and
emotional coldness from her mother, Pearl escapes the farm to find her aunt,
and ends up following a trail to her sister Meghan, who went missing years
before.
Earth is a unique coming of age story, in which Pearl must discover her
own sense of self in a family – and in a world – that doesn’t accept her. She
lives with many kinds of abuse and neglect, yet she still feels a great love
for her family. Her older sister, Meghan, has become a prostitute and a drug
addict. Pearl is much younger, yet she acts as mother to Meghan, protecting her
while putting herself at risk. This is a novel about the importance of the
natural world, but it also shows the dark side of humanity, and the many dangers
that people present to each other.
Allen’s writing is lyrical, with odd, onomatopoeic descriptors.
She has an illogical yet evocative way of describing simple moments and actions
that truly bring them to life. The style is a sort of magic realism,
reminiscent of Alice Hoffman’s novels. In contrast, some of the descriptions of
nature become heavy-handed, and the author clearly has an environmentalist
agenda – I happen to agree with it, but sometimes it seemed a bit forced. More significantly,
she uses Pearl to show the importance of sharing stories within a family so
that we can know who we are and where we came from. Pearl is set adrift without
familial roots, and she calls it a “poverty of story.”
Pearl tries to use her Catholic upbringing to understand
the indigenous spirituality that comes to her in her visions – she attends a
Catholic school and invokes Joan of Arc and Jesus to help her understand her
own situation. Later, she meets a nun who tries to help her by comparing her to
St. Theresa and her “ecstasies”, but Pearl just becomes more confused about her
role in the spiritual world.
Although Pearl is a teenager, this is not a young
adult novel. There is a high level of mental and emotional depth to her
feelings – it is more like she is using adult wisdom to tell the story of her
childhood. As Pearl discovers her family’s story, she still manages to rewrite
her own in a more positive way. Her relatives have experienced a vicious cycle
of abuse and neglect, and she refuses to repeat it. Her story is sometimes uncomfortable,
but always truthful. The novel is awkward in parts, but overall it is beautiful
and heartfelt. It is also the first in a series, which I will continue to read
in order to find out the rest of Pearl’s story.
I received this novel from Booktrope and NetGalley in
exchange for an honest review.
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