“Ever since the oil rig exploded, Daddy’s been obsessed with killing things. Small animals mostly…”
Reader, buckle up. This is a terrifying and masterfully constructed ride.
Visceral. Is a word one might use to describe the immediacy of the prose, and the honesty of the characterization After We Drowned achieves.
Demon Copperhead is a title one might compare it to, but that would be a mistake, simply because Goldberg’s book accomplishes with conviction what Kingsolver’s merely attempted.
Covering the same sort of stark wasteland, both economic and emotional, Goldberg subverts expectations time and again by delineating a tangible humanity in the lost souls she describes. And make no mistake: these are truly lost souls, but more importantly true and accurate human beings. I would challenge the reader to find a single instance in this story in which the central characters are not pinned to the page with a delicacy to be envied by the most diligent of lepidopterists.
No matter how far down her characters sink (and reader, there are some ponderous depths to be drilled in this book), Goldberg’s brilliance is in her ability to render each passing fathom with a tangible tenderness and sympathy, commanding words as if they are found items she can fit together as she wishes, managing to string narrative threads like Christmas lights – images and feelings formed into a wild story something almost exactly like life. Her characters achieve a distinctive vibrancy and authenticity with seemingly very little effort, which is of course the author’s masterful deception. She manages to tell a story in a manner at once both familiar and fresh, which is certainly something to love and something so very, very hard to do. She creates living persons out of black marks on white paper, and we all know that’s not easy. This is a book bursting at the seams with both honesty and empathy.
She manages to tell a story in a manner at once both familiar and fresh, which is certainly something to love and something so very, very hard to do. She creates living persons out of black marks on white paper, and we all know that’s not easy.
Her stark bayou environment evokes elements of southern gothic without belabouring any tropes in the process and her unforgiving dissection of the motives and wild anxieties that plague her characters rings solidly true. Just when you believe that things cannot get worse, the threadbare carpet of expectation is pulled out from beneath your feet once more. The tragedy is relentless and I would warn anyone away from it if it were not so brilliantly and believably rendered. This is not a book for the faint of heart but one for the reader who appreciates accomplished writing and would like to be in on the ground floor with a first novel by a truly remarkable writer even if only to be able to say, “I remember reading her first novel and thinking – this is an author who will do great things”.
Because she has.
And she will.
On the dusty way out of the bayous of Louisiana, leaving behind unsurmountable tragedy, and on the way to the unforeseen and unimaginably worse, main character Jesse imagines of his piecemeal family that “Maybe together we’ll find our next real good thing.”
As characters they may not.
But as readers we most certainly have.
Jill Yonit Goldberg is a Prairie-born former Montrealer living in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish territories. Recent work includes essays, short stories, and very occasional poems that have been included in publications such as Room Magazine, The London Reader, and subTerrain among others. She is co-author on The Fire Still Burns: Life In and After Residential School (Purich Books/UBC Press, 2023). Jill is half of a tango dancing pair, a half-decent photographer, and a very occasional half-marathoner. She teaches literature and creative writing at Langara College.
Publisher: Anvil Press (December 20, 2024)
Hardcover 8″ x 5.25″ | 264 pages
ISBN: 9781772142273
Michael Blouin has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award, and the CBC Literary Award. He has been the recipient of the Lilian I. Found Award, the Diana Brebner Award and the Archibald Lampman Award. His novel Chase and Haven won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, an award he received again for his novel Skin House. He is an Instructor at the University of Toronto, a guest lecturer for Carleton University, and serves as an adjudicator for both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Two of his novels are now in a permanent archive on the Moon, having landed with NASA/Firefly in 2025.
