BOOKISH FRIDAY: “THE ASH FAMILY”

Welcome to another Bookish Friday, in which I  share excerpts from books…and connect with other bloggers, who do the same.

Let’s begin the celebration by sharing Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and let’s showcase The Friday 56 with Freda’s Voice.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a NetGalley ARC:  The Ash Family, by Molly Dektar:  the book will be released on April 9, 2019.  When a young woman leaves her family—and the civilized world—to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this lush and searing debut novel.

 

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Beginning:  (Fall)

Bay and I approached the farm at dawn.  The first sun churned sideways through the trees, catching in the previous day’s rain, which the wind now shook down from the Carolina silverbells, the beeches, and the poplars.  I rolled down the window and heard the forest fizzing.

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Friday 56%:  After lunch, I joined the family in our everyday chores.  We had to clean the sheep’s stables, clean the cows’ and horses’ stables, clean the chicken houses, feed and water the chickens, make the cheese and the butter, clean the dairy, move the electric fence, check the flock, and weed, weed, weed.  No one mentioned Queen.  Pear was nowhere to be found.  But I was no longer frightened.  They had questioned me, and they had let me go.

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Synopsis:  At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place of order and chaos: the Ash Family farm. There, she joins an intentional community living off the fertile land of the mountains, bound together by high ideals and through relationships she can’t untangle. Berie—now renamed Harmony—renounces her old life and settles into her new one on the farm. She begins to make friends. And then they start to disappear.

Thrilling and profound, The Ash Family explores what we will sacrifice in the search for happiness, and the beautiful and grotesque power of the human spirit as it seeks its ultimate place of belonging.

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I am eager to begin the journey with the characters.  What do you think?

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