Georgia’s low country has acquired a masterful new fabulist.
Kimberly Brock’s sprawling third work of historical fiction earns its evocative title on every page. The marshland, in her hands, fairly thrums with stories that, tended with time and care, add up to heritage.
With writing as lush as that generative pluff mud, Brock, who lives in Atlanta, brings the sepia-toned past to vivid life. In her latest, she leaps back and forth through time, limning the inner worlds of three remarkable, resilient women and their interconnectedness. A spirit of gentle, unassuming feminism animates the plot, with male characters orbiting around them, moons to their Earth — their fabled earth.
The book opens in 1959 when Cleo Woodbine, a hardy, middle-aged artist who lives alone on Kingdom Come, a sand-spit just off Cumberland Island, receives an obituary in the mail. Regarded by the mainlanders as a crotchety recluse — kids taunt her with animal pelts — she clearly has been transfigured by events that remain a mystery until the narrative’s denouement. In the course of her personal journey to reconcile old wrongs, she encounters Frances Flood, a folklorist seeking clarity on her family, and Audrey Howell, a young, widowed innkeeper. Their viewpoints alternate with the artist’s experiences in 1932, when a fateful night of storytelling around a bonfire resulted in two drownings. Tall tales come with consequences, it turns out, but in the right hands, they can also heal old wounds.