Set against the true events of Memorial Day weekend 2015 in central Texas, Things You Would Know if You Grew Up Around Here explores empathy, history, local lore, fantastical happenings and simple humanity. Amid catastrophic flooding, Nancy Wayson Dinan's protagonist offers a compelling balance between the weird and the ordinary. Eighteen-year-old Boyd has always been unusually perceptive. Her best friend Isaac is the only one who never asked anything of her, in the unspoken way that people do. "Hurt children trailed Boyd... the forked stick of a dowser... tuned not to water, but to pain."
It's the fourth year of the drought, the beginning of summer, and Isaac is camped on the edge of the lake below Boyd's house, panning for gold: "You can pay a semester of tuition at UT with a tiny sack of that gold dust." After the first night's rain, landscapes are rearranged, people scattered, and the rain still falls. Boyd can feel Isaac lost somewhere, "the copper fear in his mouth... the shivering of his chilled limbs." Bridges out and all roads blocked, she sets out cross-country, on foot. "She had no doubt she could find Isaac; she was drawn to him like a magnetic pole, reading his distress like a Geiger counter."
So begins a chain of events and searches: Isaac in mortal danger; Boyd following instinct alone into uncharted territories; her neighbor Carla, a retired hippie recluse from Austin, following her own instincts after Boyd. Boyd's mother, Lucy Maud, accompanied by a motley crew of aging family members and Boyd's father. Isaac's father, also missing, gone treasure-hunting just as the rains began.
Dinan's narrative shifts among these quests: Carla slipping through the mud in her yoga slides. Lucy Maud, alternately drawn to her estranged husband and annoyed by his ineptness. Isaac in one predicament after another. And Boyd, whose unlikely understanding has expanded until she must navigate both time and space, lost children and Texas history, wandering through the same sodden world where she looks for Isaac.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here is fabulous and engrossing, both faithful to the real-world details of central Texas and wildly imaginative, peopled with treasure hunters, prehistoric beasts, distracted professors and one improbable young woman facing a momentous decision. Dinan's storytelling flows as forcefully as a flash flood in this spellbinding first novel in which a handsome young man, refreshingly, awaits rescue by a powerful woman. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: Forces of nature and preternatural human empathy come together in an extraordinary novel about relationships, love and place.