Serena

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction

It’s 1929, and in the North Carolina mountains, George Pemberton brings his new bride, Serena, to his timber camp.  A bold and unconventional woman, the daughter of a timber baron, Serena seems a good match for the hard young man who has worked beside his logging crews as well as run them. 

And she quickly proves her toughness.  Fifteen-year-old Rachel Harmon, pregnant with Pemberton’s bastard, approaches him at the rail head with her father.  A knife fight between the two men ends in Abe Harmon’s death, and Serena coolly faces down the sheriff and dresses her husband’s wound.

That’s the first scene in Ron Rash’s novel Serena, a shockingly good historical novel.  Read this for its gorgeous North Carolina mountain, Depression-era setting; read it for its chillingly vivid character study of the ambitious young couple; read it for the suspense (what will happen to Rachel and her baby?); read it for the grand end-of-days story as a magnificent American forest is laid waste and the livelihood of the mountain men goes with it.  Definitely, read it. 

Serena takes the logging camp by storm, dressing and riding like a man, taming an eagle to hunt the rattlesnakes that are killing the loggers, asking no quarter and giving none. 

For her, this North Carolina venture is just a first step--she’s determined to persuade investors to back her husband in a logging venture in Brazil.  Pemberton is intoxicated by her. 

But the camp seems haunted by bad luck, and the men begin to shake their heads.  As a sort of Greek chorus, they watch this ruthless young woman and her husband go to any lengths to build a timber empire and prevent the land from being made into a national park.

It takes a lot longer for Pemberton to understand Serena as clearly as the men do.  It’s not until she turns her attention to her husband’s bastard child that he understands how ruthless she really is. 

This is just amazingly good.  Rash creates a world so physically vivid and characters so mesmerizing that you’ll be transported.  The narrative build from that first scene to the story’s epic climax is a marvel of pacing and subtlety. 

2008 was a very good year, and Serena is making it onto lots of best lists.