Earth: A Novel

"The one who tells the stories rules the world."

Gorgeous in the writing about earth, nature- and heavy on the heart when reading about gifted/cursed Pearl and her uncontrollable mystical visions. Set in rural Missouri in the 1970s, Pearl's family isn't so open about embracing her sight. Bound to the earth by working the land, life is hard and has ravaged not just her parents faces but their souls as well. Why her parent's fear what's happening to her is tangled up in her father's memory of being sent away with his mentally ill sister. Pearl is lost and starving for someone to give her understanding to the visions that take over. It's interesting to find a family practically oozing earth, tied to nature and yet against the natural gift their daughter has inherited. Pearl loves the land, the earth and when she encounters the Town (with a capital T) that her mother hungers for, she feels she can have it. While the land is about scratching in the soil to make a living, one knows Pearl's soul feeds off the energy that so many 'city people' have lost touch with. Yet, her mother's aged face and spent soul is large in part due to her years spent working hard and barefoot- from raising siblings and having the world and learning cut off from her to marrying a man who has kept her from her dream of city life.
Pearl's father is more than difficult and hearing tales of the sort of tender boy he once was isn't in line with the monstrous fury that lives inside of the man Pearl lives with. "It was best to be on guard with Father, to know what sort of mood he was in." It seems he hates everything Pearl is, all the mystery inside of her. He seems to think it can be beat out of her, so she can 'live in this world." Pearl sees clearly the thing people don't wish others to see about them, and stories bubble up that want to be released. "In my house, nobody ever told tales. It wasn't just my parents. My relatives were all shut up too."... "I wanted to tell my mother that our being poor wasn't just about food- we were starved for legend."
There is a deep wound between her father and her half sister that caused her disappearance. "Just the two of them locked in their own universe of hurt." She wants to find Meghan, to know why she left. On the way, she needs to meet with her Aunt Nadine who has to have answers into her gift. Nadine, who was branded 'crazy' so early in her life. Nadine, the person that Pearl terrifyingly takes after. Is she too on the road to madness?
This story is of the Earth and the soul, and I felt while reading that I could smell and touch the surroundings. It is deeply sad and the things characters do really take a bite out of the reader. Somehow, Allen was able to reel a little compassion out of me even for characters readers normally hate. "With Father, life was a series of explosions, earthquakes that tore at the soul, craters connected by jagged fissures."
It is insightful, and Pearl is wiser than the average adult when it comes to understanding the complexities of broken people. This novel is not a sweet read, it is a festering wound but there is hope. I look forward to reading the next book in this elemental series, AIR.