Follow Me by Joanna Scott (April 2009)
Contemporary Fiction, 420 pages
Published by Little, Brown and Company

Review copy courtesy of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

On a Summer day in 1946, Sally Werner, the precocious daughter of hardscrabble Pennsylvania farmers, accepts her cousin Daniel’s invitation to ride his new motorcycle. Like so much of what follows in Sally’s life, it’s a decision driven by impulse and a thirst for adventure, a decision with dramatic and far-reaching consequences.

This book took me a while to read. Not because it is poorly written. It isn’t. The author’s style was simply one that caused me to pause and pay attention a little closer to what she was conveying. Sometimes the writing was poetic in tone, others a stream-of-consciousness that flowed along the page like the river that holds a prominent place within the story.

Oh, but look at her crossing the Court Street Bridge in the drizzle, floating more than walking, not noticing the sidewalk stained with mud, the flattened cigarillo holder on the curb like the crushed carcass of a while beetle, or the river flowing below with a deceptive sluggishness toward the lip of the falls, its surface rust-tinged, as though there were a powerful flame burning in its depths. Strange to think that this same dirty, dreary river that she had  followed from its source had led her to the place where she finally belonged.

At one point in the story I had one of those “Ah ha!” moments. You know the one: when you finally get a thought in your head about what you’ve been reading. It may not be what the author intended, but as a reader, it is my mindset that controls what I glean from a story as much as what the writer is relating.

For me, that thought was: Reinvention is a double-edged sword.

Young and impetuous, Sally faces her challenges by moving on and re-inventing herself each time one presents itself. As much as she is trying to protect herself and her daughter from the past, she is also keeping it at such a distance, that when she is forced to face it again, she can no longer see it clearly which leads to devastating consequences.

My grandmother must have loved the way dizziness washed the thoughts and memories into a blur. As a young woman she spun through life the way she spun around in the teacup on the Bonville carousel. At pivotal moments she tended to act rashly, abandoning her plans without bothering to consider alternatives, moving so quickly from the location of trouble that she would lose track of how one thing was connected to another.

The chapters alternate between Sally Werner and her granddaughter whose name is also Sally. Scott has the reader alternating between Sally of the past and the one of the present, the younger helping to show the end result of the grandmother’s running and reinventions.

We are the product of many influences: external and internal, the end result of our decisions, actions, and reactions. Follow Me takes us on one woman’s journey through life as she deals with all of these.

This is a long book that I did have to put down occasionally. But not for long. Scott had me intrigued from the beginning, caring about her characters enough that I wanted to discover the truth as much as her granddaughter.

For this reason it is receiving 4 Stars out of 5.

Joanna Scott is the author of four novels, including 1997 Pulitzer Prize finalist The Manikin, and a short story collection, Various Antidotes, which was a finalist for the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award.