KIN

A powerful and surprising story of an Appalachian childhood.

Rodenberg opens with a scene in 2017, when she was "acting as an ambassador" for a TV crew eagerly hunting for "Mountain-Dew-mouth and dirt floor stereotypes" for a segment about her Eastern Kentucky hometown, "often as inscrutable and inaccessible to outsiders as a war-torn third-world country." In between takes, she surreptitiously darted to her aging parents' trailer for a quick errand. In the remainder of the book, she takes us on a journey that expands our understanding of these scenes. After her father returned from Vietnam in the early 1970s, he moved his young family to Minnesota, where they spent a few years in a rural Christian commune before moving back to the area where he was raised. Throughout, the author's densely detailed writing style makes for engrossing reading. On her grandmother's grooming routine: “She rubbed her hands with grease when she did housework, to keep them soft and young-looking. She steamed her face each night with a fresh hot rag, wiped it with Pond's, then Oil of Olay.” A childhood game: "We played veterinarian with stray cats and dogs, pulling wolf worms from their necks with matches and tweezers and engorged ticks from the clusters on their backs, stomping and smearing the ticks in to red swirls across the blacktop; when we ran out of ticks we stomped clusters of poke berries to finish our pictures." The story continues through her teenage years: "I won't say that being punished for things I hadn't yet done made me want to do them, but it definitely finalized my plans." This is a bountiful, sometimes haunting story, but Rodenberg's structural choices may deter some readers. Her first-person story is told in a sometimes-confusing order, interrupted by novelistic third-person sections recounting the early lives of her parents and other relatives. This approach doesn’t always work, but it’s a minor quibble for an important memoir.

Rodenberg's depth of feeling, intelligence, and love open eyes and demolish stereotypes.