A father and son tale. A coming of age tale. This is a well written and thoughtful novel that might remind you, as the publisher suggests, of another book but which stands on its own merit. A good read.

A coming of age story with a classic feel and a slow, quiet tone that belies its depth. This is a surprising story that is developed in a strong and capable way. Lovely writing.

Interesting read. Following the character journeys was at times intense. Working through a life of issues and an eccentric parent you don't really understand makes compelling reading. Didn't expect some of the happenings and they do catch you by surprise. Entertaining read. Would recommend this book.

Henry grows up in a small town in the mountains. He lived with a family in a house that everybody believed to be haunted because the previous family was murdered and the case went unsolved. His father had grown up in the town and was an outsider because of his devotional love of reading.

I really enjoyed this story. I sadly had to put it down quite a few times in light of pressing matters around me. Those times were really hard for me. If I could have, I would have finished this book in one sitting. It was really amazing and emotionally charged. I loved watching Henry grow up and the experiences he had.

I didn't really dislike much about this book. Other than the typical typos in the book, there wasn't really anything wrong with it. I mean at first, I had a problem with Henry's detached sense of connection with his family and his hometown. That passed when I figured out why. I don't want to spoil the book, but I wish some things had been talked about a little more in the book as well.

I do fully recommend this book. I do feel it needs to be warned, this book will catch a person right in the feels and hold tight all through the book. It's emotionally charged. It's inspirational. It really makes you think about life and family dynamic. I'd like to get a physical copy to put on my shelf. Maybe even read it again!

There are many things I liked about this novel: the prose, the voice, the southern gothic setting. Garish and grotesque characters reminded me of Flannery O'Connor's sinners, and the small-town atmosphere was reminiscent of To Kill A Mockingbird. The story rambles and meanders, sort of like talking to an aged Southern relative whose reminiscences of time immemorial flow forth with languid ease.

Read The Barrowfields if you're into Southern gothic settings, grotesque characters, and that indelible southern voice that speaks of iced tea glasses sweating in the heat of a Sunday afternoon.

“Yet at last, he was only a man, who, like so many of us, had dreams that exceeded him.”

There are some places that imprint themselves so deeply in the people who live there, that either you never leave or you always come back. That’s the thought that occurred to me when I read The Barrowfields from Phillip Lewis. As the title suggests, the plot and its characters are tied to a particular geographical area: in this case, Old Buckram, North Carolina, “an achromatic town high in the Appalachian Mountains.” The Barrowfields of the title is an area which probably should be named the Barren Fields but somebody made a mistake along the way. It’s a place “where by some mystery nothing of natural origin will grow except a creeping gray moss.”

Growing up in extreme poverty, Henry Aster is a cuckoo in the nest of this large, impoverished and nearly illiterate household. As a child, Henry grabs onto the power of books and never lets go, even at one point stealing library books and hoarding them under his bed for future reads. Eventually, Henry leaves home and goes to college and law school only to return when his mother (she’s constantly smoking–her one vice) becomes ill. Coming home is a mistake for Henry. …


Henry, with ambitions to become “a beloved American writer,” and his horse-loving wife Eleonore, buy an abandoned mansion, built by an dying architect with a penchant for the occult. Its gothic, vlad-the-impaler design makes the house a unique, intriguing, yet daunting prospect. The house, “a monstrous gothic skeleton,” has a tragic history, but the Asters ignore it–even though of course they simply become another twist in the house’s past.

On a high shoulder of the mountain, half hidden by a row of wraithlike trees as old as time itself, sat an immense house of black iron and glass. During the day, it was an odd architectural curiosity. Due to a subtle trick of the mountain’s folding ridges, it seemed always to be in shadow, even when the sun blazed in a cloudless sky above it. From morning to night, it was cloaked in a slowly swirling mist as thick as smoke from a fire. At night, it brooded in darkness like an ember-eyed bird of prey on the edge of the mountain. Never before had a house been built like it, and never would another be built.

While Henry practices “a brief legal career with one of the two law offices in town,” by night he drinks himself into oblivion and tries to write. His wife has her horses, and the house, with its magnificent library is a fabulous labyrinth of childhood fantasies for Henry and Eleonore’s son, also called Henry.

This is a sweeping novel about a man who’s deeply rooted to a region he can’t wait to escape from, and Henry’s ultimate abandonment of his wife and children is the central mystery/emotional dilemma of the plot. I loved the first half of The Barrowfields, with its fine Southern tradition, but the second half with Henry junior’s life becoming the focus, just couldn’t match up to the first half. There’s so much going on here–so much so I wondered how this would read in serial form. The whole build up of the house with its tragic past never really goes anywhere, but hangs like a faded banner over the new residents, and the whole baby sister episode just seemed another layer of melodrama/tragedy that existed for its own sake.

Sprawling, ambitious and flawed this is a novel about fathers and sons. It’s described as a coming-of-age novel, but for me it was more about identity. There are some very fine parts indeed here which are evidence of perhaps future books we might expect from this author, for example, when son Henry, describes how his father has developed a persona to converse with the locals:

He knew how to talk like them, though. He knew how to cock his head just right, and hold his mouth open, and say, “You don’t say” and “Damn,” when he heard a remarkable story, and “Yep” and “Naw” and always “Come with us,” at the end of any conversation with an acquaintance met in an unexpected place. He’d run into someone at the grocery store and listen intently as the man talked. He’d listen with a deep focus, looking dead into the man’s eyes, almost unblinking and without saying much of anything, hunched slightly to be more or less on the same level with the man, without anything much beyond an anthropological interest in the story and the man telling it, and at the end of it he’d offer amusement and say something like, “Well, all right, Junior, I hope you have a good night. I reckon I better get on home.

Review copy.

Authors of Southern Gothic literature, stories that depend as much on place as on plot, are often concerned about the sincerity of their work. And authors that work hard to refine that genre — David Joy and Ron Rash are two contemporary writers who come to mind — achieve that authenticity.

To this growing list is debut author Phillip Lewis. His novel, “The Barrowfields,” (Hogarth) centers on the fictional town of Old Buckram but echoes of the High Country, and especially the area of West Jefferson, N.C., where Lewis was born and raised.

“The Barrowfields” is a deep, dark and mysterious novel filled with shadows of literary giants, but at its heart, it's a story about family and books and music and a house in the mountains of “iron and glass” inspired by Edgar Allen Poe. It is also a touchingly honest book that, for the reader, will linger after the final page.

Recently, on a tour stop in Boone for a reading of the novel, Lewis visited the offices of Mountain Times for an interview that turned out to be just as honest and sincere as the novel he has written. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Tom: You’ve described “The Barrowfieds” as an emotional autobiography rather than a factual one. Would you elaborate on that?

Phillip: When you write a book like this, everybody wants to know what’s real and what’s imagined; and who’s real and who’s imagined. To be completely candid, I wasn’t sure that writing about the things in my life exactly as they happened would have been of any great interest to anyone, including myself. What I really wanted to do was to create a completely different landscape and a completely different set of characters, but who would be able to convey certain feeling, certain emotional context left over from the experiences I have had.

Here’s one example: When I was 16 years old, my girlfriend got pregnant over in West Jefferson. You know, it’s a pretty small town now, but it was a smaller town then. For a number of years, whenever I went back to West Jefferson, it seemed like a bleak place to me. It seemed like a dark place, an insular place. A place where I had experienced embarrassment and shame, and I felt this opprobrium that didn’t actually fully exist. But I felt it, and I still feel it now when I go back there.

If I had just written about West Jefferson the way it is, I mean, objectively, it’s a beautiful place. The people are kind, everybody is neighborly. It’s a wonderful place to be. My mother still lives there. But, that’s how I experience it. What I wanted to do was to create a place like Old Buckram so that when you read it, you would feel, maybe, about Old Buckram the way I feel about where I grew up.

It gets fairly complex in terms of the characters in the book. So many of them are amalgamations, or amalgamations with things that I imagined and imposed upon these amalgamations.
But, it does ultimately do what I wanted it to do which was, for a period in my life I wanted it to capture and articulate the emotional aspect of that period of those experiences. Some of it was very hopeful. Some of it was bleak. Some of it was very difficult. Some of it was tragic.

Tom: Talking about those amalgamations, it seems to me that Henry, the son, is a fairly unreliable narrator — one whose credibility is compromised, and more than once, not so much by what he says or does, but by what he doesn’t say and doesn’t do. Would you agree?

Phillip: That’s a very interesting question. I don’t think he is unreliable to the extent — obviously there is a range of unreliable narrators, right? — and so, I think Henry is definitely not telling you everything. What he’s done, is he’s repressed certain memories he has a difficult time with, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. He doesn’t want that to be part of the calculus, to be something that informs his view of the world. He’s struck out on his own. He has his own way of looking at things, and what the reader knows is that everything he knows and sees is, in fact, informed by these experiences. He doesn’t want to admit that. And, in the second half of the book, when he begins to divulge more information, it is only because he feels like he has to in order to make sense of what just happened, to the reader.

If certain things hadn’t happened, he may never have divulged those things. He’s the kind of guy that keeps all those memories pretty close inside.

Tom: “The Barrowfields” is a novel about family, and one thing Henry does make clear is the intensely close relationship he has with his sister. That relationship is tender, touching and heartbreaking. I’m wondering what you drew on to create the bond between these two.

Phillip: That was drawn from experiences with my daughter. I was 16 when she was born and she was about 1 1/2 when I went to college. As you can imagine, … I’m older now, but it’s still hard to make good decisions, right decisions, no matter how you think about them. At 17, you don’t have any idea what you’re doing — and I had good mentors: My parents were trying to give me good advice and I had great teachers who were trying to give me good advice. What I tried to do was the very best I could under the circumstances so that I didn’t defy other people’s expectations while trying to meet some of my own expectations.

So, I went away to Carolina, and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The leaving was hard because at that point, she’s a 1-year-old, and I have a 1-year-old now and I couldn’t imagine leaving him for any period of time. I want to see him every single day. People’d say things like, “It’ll be over in a flash, and she won’t know you’re gone.”

I went away to college, and on one weekend I’d be doing the usual sophomoric things that freshman and sophomores do in college, funneling beer and all that stuff and acting like a complete idiot, and then the next weekend I’d drive back to West Jefferson, and that gets to some of the bleakness. I’d arrive at nighttime and come walking in and I’d be a parent for a period of time as a 18- or 19-year-old. This went on over a period of several years. A reuniting and a leaving, over and over and over again and it never got any easier. Then, I went to law school and there was this similar kind of dynamic. I felt guilt because of it, a whole range of emotions. What I really wanted to do, and the book talks about some of this, was to get a degree, get a good job, so she and I could have a house together — what we always talked about.

But, the thing that happens is that people sort of grow up in the interim. So, I finished law school, but she was older and things had changed.

Tom: The note I made in the margin at a similar point in the book between Henry and his sister was, “life intrudes.”

Phillip: That’s it. All that comes right out of that.

Tom: Was there any catharsis in writing that section, or did it make it worse?

Phillip: The only thing it did was, it allowed me to understand it better. Honestly, I really wanted there to be a catharsis. I wanted to unburden myself of it and be able to set it aside and say I’m finished with it. Like John Cheever or, there’s a poet, I can’t remember the name, who said something like we write about things like that to not only exorcise it, but to also gain some control over it. It’s better than repressing it, and it’s better than discarding it all together. If you write about it, you can shape it and control it. But, for me, it was about shaping the breadth and articulating the gravity of it all. … So, to actually convey these characters, I really had to think about it and study it and write it this way, and write it that way until I finally said, OK, that’s it, that’s exactly how it made me feel. Once I finished with it … well, it’s all still there, maybe it’s just a little more manageable.

Tom: I have to admit, that one of the most authentic — and one of my favorite — characters in the novel isn’t a person, but a dog. The sections with Buller in them really shine. Where did you find this narrative voice?
Phillip: Buller is, I would say, the one true character in the book that is based on an actual person or animal. I had a dog named Buller. I changed the breed but otherwise.

Tom: He was that large? Buller in the book weighs more than 100 pounds.

Phillip: He was huge. He was a monster. Like I described in the book, I got him when I was in law school and he went everywhere with me. It as a one-of-a-kind relationship. He and I were inseparable. I felt like maybe it was a strange thing to do, but he slept in the bed with me. When I went to the grocery store, he would go to the grocery store with me. If I was going out to eat, he was coming out to eat with me. We did that for nine years. Then, there was an evening when he stopped eating. … I took him to the vet and they did all kinds of tests and they came back after hours and said, “I’m sorry, he has a massive tumor and it’s hemorrhaging and he’s not going to make it.” Just like that, he was gone.

I’ve never experienced grief in my life like I did when I lost Buller. That was the hardest thing I’ve experienced. But, I wanted a way to memorialize him.

Tom: You were able to work through that grief to write some very funny and wonderful sections of the novel.

Phillp: Well, there were times I might have been writing with tears in my eyes while remembering him.

Tom: The novel centers on a love for books, and one thing that is reliable throughout the novel is the voluminous allusions to literature. While many references are overt, other allusions are weaved and crafted into the story. To pull this off successfully, which you do, takes a tremendous effort from the writer. Why was accomplishing this so important to your novel writing?

Phillip: One thing is, I love stuff like that when I find it in a book. When I’m reading a novel where authors have done that for me — people like David Foster Wallace. You just know there are endless levels of meaning in whatever he’s doing. Cormac McCarthy is somebody else where you have to have a dictionary available for every other page, and he’s going to teach you a hell of a lot. William Vollmann is another; “Europe Central” is a book that had a big impact on me. He’s making references and I’m having to look them up, going off to the library, but then I’m learning, and I love things like that.

I love hidden meanings, too. That’s fun once you find them. Once you realize that someone’s done that for you, you start to look. Like “House of Leaves” by Mark Danielewski. That’s a completely different level, but once you realize he’s put little, coded messages in there — ah, then it becomes a treasure hunt, to say the least.

Apart from all that though, it adds another layer of meaning that you didn’t have to have, but if you really wanted to look you would find and it would be meaningful to you. Like the name of the cemetery (in “Barrowfields”), Avernus (an ancient name for a volcanic crater near Cumae, Italy). And just beginning with the name, Old Buckram. … If you get the end and you see the definition of buckram (a stiff cloth often used to cover books), then you go back to the beginning and look and see there are layers upon layers of meanings that I hope people will enjoy.

Tom: Similarly, your love for music is evident throughout the novel. Both Henry and his father, Henry, display a love for the piano, with the younger earning a music scholarship. You make very specific choices in the music that flows throughout the novel, and those choices run from Chopin to Led Zeppelin to Doc Watson. Why such an eclectic mix — and will that mix surprise some readers?

Philip: To answer the second question first, it probably will. There will be some people listening to Chopin who are not going to be familiar with Doc Watson, and some people listening to Doc Watson who aren’t going to be familiar with Chopin. That shouldn’t happen. Everybody should know both of them, intimately.

I love music, it’s always been a big part of my life. I play the guitar, play the piano — not very well — and so many times I’d be writing a scene and I’d be trying to find that darkness, that melancholy, and because I listen to so much Chopin, late-period Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, I would go to my catalogue of stuff and I would remember Opus 37 No. 1 has the funeral march in the middle of it and how much I love that. I’d put that on and sometimes it would be incorporated into the writing. That was another big part of it.

Another part of it was that I wanted there to be a visceral discrepancy between what was going on inside the house and what was going on outside the house. So, if you were to be anywhere in Ashe County (N.C.) like where I grew up and you were to go out on a Saturday night, you’d find people playing mountain music, bluegrass, old-time. That’s what’s going on outside of this house on top of the hill.

Inside the “Vulture House” it couldn’t have been more different. The father is in there playing the late-period Chopin. Henry’s playing late-period Chopin. It furthers the distance, even though the house is house right there in the middle of everything.

Tom: Well, since you brought it up, the house that Henry, the father, buys for his family in Old Buckram — the house of “black iron and glass” or, as you say, the “Vulture House" — almost becomes a character in itself. Was there any inspiration for this anywhere in the High Country of North Carolina where you grew up?

Phillip: It was just made up. I was reading a lot of Edgar Allen Poe at the time. There were several iterations of the house. Probably the first iteration it was something more like the Ernest Hemingway House in Key West if you had stuck it up on top of the hill. Big porches and all that. I kept changing it to give it the atmosphere it needed to really work.


Tom: Let’s talk about the writing process for a moment. Given the sheer poetry of your writing, it is difficult to believe that this is your debut novel and you’ve not published anything else. No short stories, even. Your day job is an attorney: How did you hone the craft of writing fiction?

Phillip: I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve had a couple of blogs, not up anymore. I’ve always written. I’ve always had journals where I would try to paint portraits and things with words. For a long period of time I felt I just didn’t do that well at all. … It was extraordinarily frustrating, and so what I would do, because I wanted to voice these things, is that I would read all the time. I read anything and everything. I would pick it up and say, how does this person handle dialogue? How does this person construct this scene? How does this person write this landscape? Whatever the case might be. And, I would go back and put it in the brain and say, that’s one way to do it.
Once I’d read everything I thought I could read, then, somebody else would say, oh, have you read Evelyn Waugh? And I’d say, no, I haven’t, and they say, you have to read Evelyn Waugh! Then, I’d go and buy the whole collection, because I’d hate it when people would say to me, you haven’t read so-and-so? So, I would go and read it all and learn more about how people were doing things, and then I’d try again.

But even with this (“The Barrowfields”) — and this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done; I’ve never tried harder to do anything in my life. I’ve spent more hours doing this over a period of years, butt in the chair, everyone else is sleeping — I would work and work and work on a sentence or a paragraph and I would still be left at the end of it that this is just mediocre. This is not where it needs to be. I don’t have the powers to do this. But, like a cat eating a grindstone, I just kept going. I don’t know where it stands now. The readers will be the final judge of that.
Tom: Are you comparing yourself to anyone else, or is this an internal feeling of inadequacy?

Phillip: That’s a great question. It’s largely internal. I think about people like John Keats or (Vincent) Van Gogh who worked and worked and worked and just gradually got better. To me, I was just reading what I was writing and I wasn’t satisfied.

Tom: I ask this because the novel has echoes of Thomas Wolfe, a master of isolated observations and contemplations that resonate on a human level. Did you consciously approach your prose in this way, or is it a result of a lifetime of deep reading?

Philip: I love Thomas Wolfe, and if I could write like anybody, I would write like Thomas Wolfe. There is more honesty and more sincerity and more passion in Wolfe’s writings than anyone I’ve ever read. It’s just exactly as you say. He had a way where he could walk in here and he could describe your office, and everyone in the world could read those three paragraphs and see it. … He’d describe it in a way, that you were there. I’ve said that a sincere observation followed by a sincere utterance is the most powerful and effective form of communication. That’s what Wolfe did. … That’s what I was trying, hard as hell, to do.

Tom: I note the unusual choice of repeating the prologue in Chapter 48. I’ve never seen this before. Why this choice?

Phillip: I’ve never seen it before either. I wanted to bring it back around to a point, to take you back to the place the narrator was before he tells you this whole story. … The prologue is a bit mysterious. It was a way of saying, here, now I’ve given you the tools to understand it. Now you have the whole history, and here we are back again at this point and now you’re going to see it through different eyes.

Tom: Like all good novels, no matter how satisfying the story, there were parts of “The Barrowfields” I wanted more of. The editing process can be gruesome, and typically involves cutting more than adding. But, with the novel as it is now published, if your editor had said you need to fill another hundred pages, how would you have answered that request?

Phillip: I would have wanted to write more about Old Buckram. I was influenced by Faulkner a great deal and how he surveyed off Yoknapatawpha County and sort of laid out all the streets and envisioned the whole thing so clearly and in so much detail. I kind of had an idea at some point that I wanted to do something like that. But, I felt it was too much detail. Especially today: Today’s readers are different than they were 30 years ago, 50 years ago. People are skimming on a Kindle on the train into the city, whatever. I felt like it would be too much detail, but that’s one place I really wanted to go, to get in the weeds on that and create more characters and fill out Old Buckram in greater detail.

Tom: Williams Styron said that “a good book should leave you … slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.” You accomplish this with “The Barrowfields.” Was that a specific goal?

Phillip: If I did my job, this is the effect it will have. I mean every word in there. It’s all sincere and it comes from a very honest emotional place. The way I’ve experienced life has been, at times, in awe, at times, downtrodden, at times, beleaguered — the whole range of the human emotional experience. I wanted people to get that. I want people to read this and finish the last page and say, “That was real.” Not in the sense that any of this really happened, but in the sense that this has articulated some aspect of the human experience that they can relate to.

There was some discussion about how the book would end, and the editors said they wanted it to be hopeful and upbeat. But, I wasn’t going to be satisfied with that. I wanted it to end in a way that people would understand that this was a sincere expression.

I hope that you close the book and a week later you still remember it. And, maybe a year later, something happens and you hearken back to it and you think that this was an experience that the narrator had in “The Barrowfields” and this is how he dealt with it, and have that be meaningful to them. So much of my life is informed by literature. If I am able to do just a little bit of that with this book, then I am extremely grateful.
Tom: What are your plans for Act 2? Can we expect more in the vein of Wolfe — semi-autobiographical, or a different tack? Or, maybe revisiting Old Buckram?

Phillip: I’ve started a couple of different things, but I don’t know where they’re going to lead. I’ve thought about starting something in Old Buckram and taking that opportunity to draw it out some more. … I haven’t done what I really wanted to do in achieving the writing I really want to write, as effectively as I want to be able to do it. …
Tom: After all, you’re still a practicing attorney. So, you effectively have two careers.

Phillip: I’ve found it’s difficult to do both. … It was a huge strain on my relationship at home trying to do the book and work, and it continues to be. But, that’s part of it. When you do something and you survive and accomplish what you want to accomplish, it builds some part of your character out you didn’t have before. I feel like that’s happened to me. I feel like I’m a different person than I was three or four years ago. And, I want to keep doing with that.

Henry Aster, Senior, is a bookworm in a town where books are considered oddities and no one understands his passion for the written word. When he leaves home to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer, he has no plan to return but fate, and a sick relative, eventually draw him back to his Appalachian mountain hometown. When he moves his new family into an old abandoned mansion, he finds himself an unwilling husband and father, still intent on writing the great American novel, and unwittingly, leaving a legacy for his son, also named Henry, the only other bookworm in town. The Barrowfields is a tale of generational issues - the ones we escape and the ones that plague us forever and Philip Lewis writes a narrative that is simultaneously beautiful, haunting and witty.
The story, set in the North Carolina ridges of the Appalachian mountains, shows a remarkable young man who knows he is different and seeks to find his tribe, determined to make them up if necessary, and his attempts to reconcile the two parts of himself - the desire for love and acceptance and the desire to forge his own way. This stunning debut novel is one man's examination of his father's humble life and as I read, I bookmarked several spots where I laughed out loud, cried or just wanted to share the passages with everyone I knew.
What I Liked
The prose was beautiful and the story was engaging from the first paragraph:
My Father was one of only two children born in Old Buckram's cinderblock hospital in the cold and bitter autumn of 1939. The other child, a young boy who didn't live long enough to get a name or a soul to be saved, was buried by his mother on a hillside near town when the ground warmed enough to dig him a proper grave. There was no service and no one sang hymns.
The descriptions were so imaginative, it felt like the Appalachian characters had come to life to give their own contribution to the story.
The author writes conversation well but his skill is in the comical and witty purview he casts onto his narrative.
What I Didn't Like
I didn't like the cover design. I think the eye peering out from the slit was a little offputting and gave the book a little bit of a creepy vibe.
There were parts of the novel that rambled so I wasn't sure where the story was going and the author's choice to omit an important piece of information until the end of the book made the reveal a little anticlimactic because it changed the tone of the story.
Would I Recommend?
Yes. I gave this novel 3.5 stars because while the writing was so well done, there were a couple technical issues that weren't fully resolved for me.
Who Should Read This Book?
In the descriptions of a young boy who wants to read everything he can get his hands on, bookworms will see themselves and enjoy this book. In the frustrations of a young man whose ambitions are discouraged by everyone he knows when they tell him no one ever made a living by writing, authors of all ilk will enjoy this book. And for everyone who has ever had a dream that no one else understood while they toiled at it, often unsuccessfully for a long time because unsupported dreams take a lot longer to come true, then we will all see ourselves within these pages and enjoy this book.

<b>The Short of It:</b>

A father and son story but really a story about family relationships and what it means to come home.

<b>The Rest of It:</b>

Henry Aster’s father returns to the small Appalachian town where he grew up and moves his family into a house with a past. The dark, immense home was once the scene of a grisly murder involving young children. Its looming presence foreshadowing the unraveling of the family to come.

From the description it sounds like a ghost story and maybe it is but not the kind you’d be expecting. This story focuses on the relationship between father and son, missed-opportunities, and at its heart, how we process grief and loss.

After a terrible loss, Henry’s father, a brilliant man trying to reinvent himself as a writer, struggles with what he’s been dealt. The entire family struggles with him but in different ways. Instead of coming together, they push each other away and it’s incredibly heartbreaking to witness.

There is a lot of good to be had in this novel. The writing is lovely but the Asters are readers so there are plenty of literary references that I jotted down. I love when books mention other books. But what I really loved was the slow build of what eventually causes the family to fall apart. There is a lot of tension in this novel which made the page turns go that much faster.

However, one section of the novel strayed from the main story which seemed a little out of left field but I was very happy to see how it fit into the story as a whole once I got to the end of the book. The final pages are gold. I reread them many times and loved them to pieces.

One of my favorite books of all time is A Separate Peace by John Knowles and although The Barrowfields is nothing like that book in story, the “coming-of-age” aspect of this novel reminds me a lot of A Separate Peace and yes, maybe even the main character reminds me of it, too.

I say, read it.

For more reviews, visit my blog: <a href="http://bookchatter.net">Book Chatter</a>.

I received this ARC from netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

Set in current day in a small Appalachian town in North Carolina, Henry grows up at the foot of his father's writing desk. Tradegy tips his father 'over the edge' and we watch this family unravel.

From the description ... "Mythic in its sweep and mesmeric in its prose" ... in my opinion the writing is voluminous, capacious. "Cadaverous ambience" is just a small example that made me chortle. Too many words describing a very minute thing.

Watching a family spiraling down in a free fall makes good reading. Overall, the story was interesting. The writing was a bit over the top for my taste.
3☆

I find that books and food have a lot in common. Some books are nourishment and comfort for your soul, reminding us about what is important in life. Some books are fun to snack on and taste good, but provide little nourishment. Other books are exotic adventures, asking our noses and tongues to try something we haven't tasted before.

The Barrowfields was comfort food that someone tried to recreate from a childhood memory. It never comes out quite the same as when your mom/dad/grandmother/grandfather made it even if you follow the recipe exactly, but that doesn't mean that it is bad. It just has a hint of something that is different ... That is how I felt when reading this book.

The book itself followed 3 generations of men in a family in North Carolina told through the point-of-view of the youngest male. On the surface, this book is about family, about growing up, about the South. It's also about going through life with mysteries that aren't solved or that shouldn't be solved. It's about finding oneself and where one fits in relation to others. It's about having the self-assurance or character to know who you are without others' approval. It's about separating from your family in order to become the person that you need to willingly accept obligations.

As you may have guessed, I liked this book, but there were parts of the book that I found unnecessary. There was a little too much thrown into the book. The whole subplot with the Henry's girlfriend was a bit much for me. The book would have been just fine if that whole part had been edited out. The sinister house portrayal was also a bit much.

When I finished the book, I was left with that quiet contentment after having comfort food. I just wanted to sit and savour it for a while.

It's a wonderful first book and I look forward to reading more from the author.

Disclaimer: I received an electronic unedited reader's proof from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

The barrowfields are barren fields in Old Buckram, North Carolina. Some people believe the fields are haunted. Old Buckram is where the Aster family has lived for generations. This book is narrated by Henry Aster Jr. His father Henry Sr. was an aspiring author who became a lawyer. He never felt at home in this town where his love of books was an anomaly. Nevertheless he returned to it with his wife and continued to live there with his two children until one day he just disappeared. You don't find out what happened to him until the very end of the book. Henry Sr. was a complicated, interesting character. The entire book should have been about him. Unfortunately, this book doesn't stick with his story. The more I read of this book the less I liked it. In the second half it shifted to the tedious story of Henry Jr. and his romance with a fellow student named Story. Story is troubled (really mopey) due to a mystery surrounding her adoption. The solution to this mystery is so obvious that it didn't deserve a paragraph, let alone multiple chapters. The plot needed significant pruning.

I give credit to a contemporary southern fiction author who writes about something other than meth addicts and pick up trucks, however I found this book very unsatisfying and I thought the author tried too hard to write "beautiful" passages.

I received a free copy of the ebook from the publisher, however I wound up listening to the audiobook borrowed from the library.

I had a difficult time starting this review because there are so many things I liked about this book that it was hard for me to just choose a few things to focus on. But since I must choose, I would have to say that the beautiful writing, first and foremost, is what got me completely drawn into this book. From the very first page to the very last one, the writing was lyrical, descriptive, engaging. The author Phillip Lewis has a unique skill in being able to render vivid descriptions of people, places, events, etc. in a few short sentences, sometimes in a mere few words, and do it in a way that the reader feels fully immersed in what he is describing. Some of my favorite descriptions in the book were of the old mansion situated on the side of the mountain in the fictitious town of Old Buckram, North Carolina – a formidable, intimidating structure that had seen its own fair share of tragedy in its decades of existence, which succeeded in giving the house a perpetually macabre, haunted aura. The detail with which the house was described made me feel as though I was right there alongside the members of the Aster family as each of them either explored the house for the first time or had to bear witness to some tragic event that inevitably occurs in the house during the time that the family reluctantly occupies it.

In addition to the writing, another aspect I loved was the huge role that books (both reading books and writing them) as well as music had in the story. As a book lover myself who also has a great appreciation for music, I could not help but become completely immersed in the narrator’s story, especially the parts about his family, specifically his father with whom he shared a similar passion for reading and also playing classical music. As I followed the narrator’s story, I felt at times that I was riding on a roller coaster of emotions, especially during the first third or so of the story when books of all kinds were front and center and the characters seemed to play only supporting roles. Even when the main characters became the focus of the story again, books and music continued to play a prominent role and were interwoven seamlessly throughout the rest of the story, which I loved.

This is an excellent book with an engaging story and relatable characters which easily would have been a 5 star read for me if it hadn’t been for the middle section of the book (roughly 30% to 40% if I had to quantify it) -- the entire segment where the narrator (Henry Aster the son) goes off to college and subsequently to law school. While I understood the need for this segment to exist (as a means for Henry to flee from all the tragedy and pain of his past as well as a conduit for him to meet his true love), I felt that the way this section was written was very different from the rest of the book. It felt very out of place to me, almost as though the entire section was taken from another story and dropped into this one. I definitely felt that this portion of the book interrupted the flow of the story and I wanted nothing more than for the narrator to hurry up and finish school so the focus could shift back to his family and his hometown and everything that had happened that was part of the past he was desperately trying to flee. After much consideration, I ended up begrudgingly giving this book 4 stars instead of the full 5 stars.

I decided to keep this review relatively short, as I feel like nothing I write can do justice to this book. This is a book that needs to be “read” rather than “described” because that is the only way to properly experience and appreciate the story that the author has to tell (and yes, I am still in shock that this is the author’s debut novel – I will surely be on the lookout for subsequent works by this author). Highly recommended read that is absolutely worth the time!

Received advance reader’s copy from Hogarth / Crown Publishing via Blogging for Books

The more I read these types of books, the more I discover that dysfunctional family sagas are not my cup of tea. Let's face this, "debut" author sometimes tend to overuse this tope to create a barebones plot outline.

I wish that I could say that I've found an exception to the rule, but this one is unfortunately not what I was hoping it was. We follow Henry, a child of two ambitious artists that live in a dark and ghostly mansion at the top of the hill, that's rumored to be haunted because of the previous owners mysterious deaths. It seems that his father is a depressive alcoholic who neglects everything and everyone around him for his sacred "writing" which he considers his whole life. His mother has put up with this behavior for years, and has not ben a comforting mother figure to neither him nor her daughter Threnody. Henry seems to take the mother and father role in her life. The setting is a small rural town in Northern Appalachia, where both the father and son want to escape but ultimately their town calls them back (see the repetitive patterns yet?)

As for the writing, where is the editor or was there any editing work done on this? You could not believe the number of "and"s and repetitive phrases that were repeated in the same sentence/paragraph. Lots of the word choice and sentence structure felt very discombobulated to the point that I felt frustrated with it. I just thought that this needs a lot more work writing-wise. One might say: "But readers like me should maybe move past that since after all he is a debut author, so cut him some slack right?" (I have greater expectations, and also if the writing sucks, it's ruins everything so...)

I was also disappointed in the way that the adoption process was handled. There is a certain character who is in a relationship with our MC and then of course something about her biological parents is revealed and our MC is the fire to ever notice the answer. I just thought that whole section wasn't well thought-out and unrealistic in terms of legal stipulations and then how the information was even discovered.

One of the only things that I genuinely enjoyed where the flashbacks to Henry and Threnody's sibling relationship when they were children. He used to read her books and make up stories and sing to her every night before bed, which I thought was really sweet and showed a caring side in his otherwise unlikeable nature. That point in time was absolutely precious to watch unravel, although I can't say the rest for the same of the book.

**Thanks to bloggingforbooks and the publisher for providing me with a copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.**

A powerful story focused on 3 generations of men and their tribulations, beginning with a hard-working laborer named Helton Astor. Then there is Henry, the youngest of Helton’s 5 children, a precocious child who grows up to be a gifted man, devourer of books, but who’s brilliance leads to obsession and madness. Lastly, there is Henry’s son, also named Henry (I’ll call him Henry II). Henry II’s journey of overcoming the overwhelming sadness of his youth to starting over, forgiving and healing was the most captivating of all. I loved this character, his strengths and his weaknesses.

I savored and highlighted numerous passages, which I can only describe as dark, lyrical, desperate, hopeful, breathtaking. This debut novel is quite an accomplishment and it felt like I was reading a classic work by a renowned author.

Another shining star of note is not a character at all, but the family’s home - a giant gothic, brooding, bleak, creaky yet extravagant home which takes on a personality all its own. I could close my eyes and picture this estate vividly, as events take place within its walls, a place so brilliantly depicted, a whole chapter dedicated to its glory but which never felt tedious.

This is an unforgettable story and I eagerly look forward to the author’s next book.

"And it came to me again how little time we all had, and how much time I'd let pass since I'd seen her. I thought of our respective times on this earth and how she and I were tied together by so many things, and that she should've been there with me. That something inside me was torn apart, and that this act of tearing was my continued separation from her."

Growing up in a spooky mansion in a small Appalachian town, Henry Aster is no stranger to loss. His deeply troubled father, who spends much of his time drinking and writing a book no one thinks he'll finish, is sent over the edge when tragedy strikes the family. And just like that, he's gone.

Henry fades away from his mother and sister when he leaves for college. There, he falls in love with a girl who's determined to find her biological father. And as he stands beside her through the struggles she faces, he has a revelation about his own family that lures him back home.

First off, I cannot believe this is a debut novel. The writing, the storyline, the characters ... everything about "The Barrowfields" feels authentic and exquisite and familiar. It is written in such a natural style. As Henry becomes a man and reflects on his father's abandonment, he has these little flashbacks of the days and months before his father left.

It hit me so hard when I realized the irony of his relationship with his girlfriend, Story. She longs to know who her real father is. Meanwhile, Henry's loss of his father shapes the decisions he makes. Rather than looking out for his mom and sister after his dad leaves, he abandons them, too. And as I read, I kept waiting for him to make the connection.

These are characters that I couldn't help but care about, and the desolate, backwoods setting really settled into my bones, much the same way it does for Henry. He loathes the place where he grew up, yet he can't stay away.

"The Barrowfields" is a heartbreaker of a book, a story of the tenuous threads that hold a family together and how they can be threatened by grief, depression and abandonment. It's a tale of broken promises and redemption, shot through with unexpected moments of levity. It's a must-read that has all the makings of an enduring classic.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 stars

This is one of those books where I knew from the first page, actually the first line that I would love the writing. Subtle, quiet at first, but then just amazingly descriptive writing that brings you to this place, this small town called Old Buckram in NC and this house on the side of the mountain. A house that was a family's with a tragic past, but it's not their tragedy that is front and center - it's the tragedies that we experience in the Aster family who come to live in the house. Henry Aster, the narrator drew me in immediately telling the story of his father, also named Henry who grew up in this small Appalachian town where pretty much no one reads except him. I loved hearing how as a child his father "stole" hundreds of books from the school library and when asked what was he going to do with all of these books , he simply replied , "I planned to read them." And read he does ! His love of literature is depicted in all of the books he has read and in his struggle to write one of his own. I loved how much books and reading were a part of this story. Some of my favorite scenes were young Henry reading each night to his younger sister Threnody. This is a book lovers story in so many ways. I don't know much about classical music, but the music that both Henry and his father play on the piano is a big part of the story too. But the life there is not all tranquil with music and books. There is death and tragedy and much sadness.

The first half of the book was more introspective, more serious, sadder than the middle where Henry goes to college, then law school, running from things that happened that are not clear until towards the end of the book. The middle part felt mundane compared to the beginning - the drinking and partying hiding what was really going on in Henry's head and heart. He has abandoned his old life and while doing so abandons his family, especially his sister. I could hardly wait for him to go back home.

I loved the writing, the characters, how I felt as if I were in this town and this house. Lewis expertly gives us such a sense of place here! I loved everything about it even though there was so much heart ache. This is about home and family bonds that are broken and dreams that are never fully realized and about the tragic impact of alcohol and depression. Yet, with all of that, there is hope. My final thought was - wow - this is a debut novel? I just can't say enough how much I was impressed with this beautiful prose and can hardly wait to see what he writes next .

Note: this is an article written by the author reflecting on the autobiographical nature of this book. I read it after I finished the book and would suggest that if you read the book wait until you are finished.
http://www.readitforward.com/authors/autobiography-in-the-barrowfields/

I received an advanced copy of this book from Hogarth/Crown through NetGalley.

When I first began to read this novel, I spent a lot of time simply admiring the prose and the detailed story being cultivated. At the same time, I wondered where exactly the author was going to go with this novel. In the beginning, I was unsure about how I felt about the story's progression. But all of that changed as the story continued. Told from the perspective of Henry Aster Jr., this story shows how his family's past haunts him even as he distances himself from his childhood. We see Henry as he attempts to make friends, and become an individual in his own right ... all while he ends up following the exact same route as his father. We watch as he falls in and out of love, deals with his anger and guilt over his father's betrayal. By the time I got to the final chapter of this story, I was mesmerized - not only by the prose but also by Henry himself. We see how family can shape you, can drive you away, can bring out the best and the worst out of you. This novel made me think and it definitely made me feel. I'm finding it difficult to articulate my thoughts and feelings, because there are just so many! This novel made me reflect on my own relationships with my family and my friends, and it made me reflect on how these interactions have shaped me into the person I am today and the person I will become in the future. This is a wonderful debut novel, and I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys literary fiction!

Set in the Appalachian Mountains, this is a coming-of-age story about young Henry and his family, living in a sinister, almost gothic mansion called Barrowfields. With such well developed characters, author Phillip Lewis shows his grand writing style and sensitivity. I will be looking for more by this author.