Serena by Ron Rash

Serena

by Ron Rash

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains—but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.

Reviewed by brokentune on

3 of 5 stars

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2.5*

I had high hopes. The book had been on my TBR for years (way before the film – and I haven’t watched the film (not a Bradley fan)) and came highly recommended by a friend with shared reading tastes. It looked promising.

Shortly after starting Serena, I already learned something: male authors too can spend a whole lot of time describing what clothes everyone is wearing.
The book was filled with seemingly endless of descriptions of clothes. Ironically, the descriptions of clothes annoyed me more than the male gaze descriptions of Serena’s body. And we only get to know her body, even tho she is the only fascinating character in the book.

“The Plotts circled and leaped, holding onto the bear with teeth and claw a few moments before falling away only to circle and leap again, the Redbones yelping and darting in to snap at the legs. Then Pemberton felt the barrel of a rifle against his side, felt its reverberation as the weapon fired. The bear staggered two steps backward. As Pemberton fell, he turned and saw Serena place a second shot just above the bear’s eyes. The creature wavered a moment, then toppled to the ground and disappeared under a moiling quilt of dogs.”

Serena had more true grit than any of the characters in Charles Portis’ classic Western True Grit. I mean, she had to be pretty badass to shoot a bear right between the eyes.

The story was slow to take off, and for the most part I enjoyed this meandering development and setup of the books crisis. I didn’t enjoy the writing, but it was – apart from the male gaze issue and the endless descriptions of clothes – not horrible.
The issue I had with the book is that when we finally do reach the point where the plot of the story turns into a Jacobean revenge tragedy, we get to know even less about our main character than we did in the first half of the book. This made the plot rather ridiculous. I ended up feeling very underwhelmed by this book. There was so much potential, but it was so underdeveloped.
For a book that plays obvious tributes to Greek tragedy and even more pointedly Shakespeare’s Macbeth, we do not get to see the tragic elements of the story at all because we do not get to see Serena’s internal workings. We don’t get to know her at all. For all the allusions to Macbeth (there are knives and bloodied hands etc.) Serena is missing the same internal conflict of the main character that Jo Nesbo skipped in his re-telling of Macbeth (which I whined about on my WP blog here).
I’m really peeved by this, because much like Nesbo’s Macbeth it reduces the story to a quasi “Western” (except set in the late 1920s Smoky Mountains). It certainly has the feel of True Grit – and about the same number of snakes.
It didn’t work for me as well as the book should have.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 9 September, 2020: Finished reading
  • 9 September, 2020: Reviewed