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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780061470851
ISBN number: 0061470856
Label: Ecco
Manufacturer: Ecco
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: October 01, 2008
Publishing house: Ecco
Release Date: October 07, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 1121
Studio: Ecco
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Product Description:
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.
Amazon.com Review:
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.
The Gift of Silence: An Essay by Ron Rash
When readers ask how I came to be a writer, I usually mention several influences: my parents’ teaching by example the importance of reading; a grandfather who, though illiterate, was a wonderful storyteller; and, as I grew older, an awareness that my region had produced an inordinate number of excellent writers and that I might find a place in that tradition. Nevertheless, I believe what most made me a writer was my early difficulty with language.
My mother tells me that certain words were impossible for me to pronounce, especially those with j’s and g’s. Those hard consonants were like tripwires in my mouth, causing me to stumble over words such as “jungle” and “generous.” My parents hoped I would grow out of this problem, but by the time I was five, I’d made no improvement. There was no speech therapist in the county, but one did drive in from the closest city once a week.
That once a week was a Saturday morning at the local high school. For an hour the therapist worked with me. I don’t remember much of what we did in those sessions, except that several times she held my hands to her face as she pronounced a word. I do remember how large and empty the classroom seemed with just the two of us in it, and how small I felt sitting in a desk made for teenagers.
I improved, enough so that by summer’s end the therapist said I needed no further sessions. I still had trouble with certain words (one that bedevils me even yesterday is “gesture”), but not enough that when I entered very first grade my classmates and teacher appeared to notice. Nevertheless, certain habits of silence had taken hold. It was not just self-consciousness. Even before my sessions with the speech therapist, I had convinced myself that if I listened attentively enough to others my own tongue would be able to mimic their words. So I listened more than I spoke. I became comfortable with silence, and, not surprisingly, spent a lot of time alone wandering nearby woods and creeks. I entertained myself with stories I made up, transporting myself into different places, different selves. I was in training to be a writer, though of course at that time I had yet to write more than my name.
Yet my most vivid memory of that summer is not the Saturday morning sessions at the high school but one night at my grandmother’s farmhouse. After dinner, my parents, grandmother and several other older relatives gathered on the front porch. I sat on the steps as the night slowly enveloped us, listening intently as their tongues set free words I could not master. Then it appeared. A bright-green moth big as an adult’s hand fluttered over my head and onto the porch, drawn by the light filtering through the screen door. The grown-ups quit talking as it brushed against the screen, circled overhead, and disappeared back into the night. It was a luna moth, I learned later, but in my mind that night it became indelibly connected to the way I viewed language--something magical that I grasped at but that was just out of reach.
In very first grade, I began learning that loops and lines made from lead and ink could be as communicative as sound. Now, almost five decades later, language, spoken or written, is no longer out of reach, but it remains just as magical as that bright-green moth. What writer would wish it otherwise.
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Rated by buyers 
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"Serena" is the story of an ambitious young couple, George and Serena Pemberton, who run a logging camp In North Carolina in the late 1920s. When George brings his new wife home from Boston, he is greeted by the irate father of a local girl who is carrying his child. The Pembertons are impervious to the problems of anyone around them, and they are obsessive in their desires to achieve wealth and power through their logging business. Their greed and destruction of forests is in opposition to other characters in the book who are promoting the designation of the area as the Smoky Mountains National Park. The setting and the history surrounding the story were interesting to me but the characters were ruthless and didn't seem to have many redeeming qualities, a factor which caused me to lower my review to 3 stars.
Rated by buyers 
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I recieved this book as a gift so it was not something I probably would have picked except that I like to read local authors. From the very first page, the violence and the extreme characters were over the top for me. I didn't learn very much history about the park but the logging information is very detailed and informative.
Rated by buyers 
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This dark tale set in an Appalachian logging camp during the depression is the story of a mad woman's obsession. Even after reading the book I am not sure whether the obsession is for money, or power, or what, but Serena is clearly a driven woman unfettered by common morality or sentiment. In the annals of ruthlessness, she deserves an honored place.
The book chronicles Serena's marriage to Pemberton, who she always calls by his last name. Pemberton is a lumber baron who lets nothing stand in the way of his logging. Serena comes from someplace out west where she learned the lumber business. She finds Pemberton, marries him and becomes his business partner. Her past is obscure but past doesn't matter for Serena. She observes of her father that he is of no consequence because he is dead now.
One of my favorite parts of the novel was a literary device. The logging camp has a group of loggers who regularly take breaks from their work and discuss religion, politics and the goings on with Serena and Pemberton. They make up a depression age Greek chorus to comment upon the protagonists as the plot unfolds and it is one of the more entertaining aspects of the book.
The starkness of this simple plot contrasts with the rich descriptions of life and death in the logging camps during the depression. Serena and Pemberton battle the elements, their partners, and an incipient conservationist movement along the way. Morality falls before the power of madness, making for dark and entertaining read right up to the end.
Rated by buyers 
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This book is one of my personal top ten reads for 2008. There are enough reviews here to get the gist of the story, but the story itself, of the timber industry in the highlands of North Carolina, is only the backdrop for issues of love, betrayal, greed, selflessness and selfishness. Ron Rash has created some of the most fascinating characters I have encountered for a long time. If I could rate higher than five stars, I would!
Rated by buyers -
In "Serena" the author's words mean something, everything; they are not wasted. Descriptions of the surroundings, the woods, the harsh environment, all tie into the life led by the woodsmen and Serena and George. Serena herself seems to embody this environment. Juxtaposed is the sexual, sensual relationship between George and Serena. She is the agressor, the hunter, the animalistic person, while George is mesmerized. Is he perhaps living his life through her, unable to be the man he thinks he should, based on the culture of the harsh reality in which he lives? The unborn child, to Serena, is another possession, a legacy, and when lost, like the woods they could not buy, anger is her response. Unable to purchase the timberland, Serena and George look elsewhere, not only in the state, but in Brazil, where Serena has a dream of striking it rich. When Serena loses her unborn to miscarriage, she transfers her rage to George's son, Jacob. Failure is not Serena's way. If she can not own it, than she will destroy it. Ironically, what Serena does with all her "possessions is to destroy them.
The book had multiple levels: a woman who fails to birth and raise a child; a woman who is ahead of her time in a man's world, a woman who has a failure of a moral compassion. George is not quite her equal and her contempt for his weakness, as she saw it, leads to a tragic end.
Mr. Rash's description of the leveling of the land for timber makes an environmentalist cringe; the word rape came to me mind while reading. Pull out the logs, slash and burn, no consideration for the workers, all in the the name of profit. Thus, as a sideline, this book describes the workings of a small lumber operation and how so much of the countryside, in the past, became denuded, losing creeks, rivers, fish, and creating mud slides and major landscape changes.
Few books have gripped me from beginning to end, but this is one of them. After I read this, I read "One Foot in Eden," Mr. Rash's earlier novel, and one can definitely see his growth in writing. "Eden", while good, did not have the tenor and pace of this book. However, I do recommend it.
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