Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Thank you to Bloomsbury publishing for an advanced readers copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The prologue of “Kin” sets the tone and lets the reader know that this is no “Hillbilly Elegy”—that Rodenberg intends to be fair to Appalachia and its people, without pulling any punches or sugarcoating the realities of the region, or of her troubled history.

In the prologue, Shauna Kay Rodenberg is headed home to Kentucky with a news crew as a kind of Appalachian consultant, and she is as wary as some of the new segment’s intended subjects will turn out to be, just as we have always been when it comes to media coverage, and with good reason.

Chapter One takes us to 1978, and from there, the reader moves around in time, focusing on different kinfolks and their stories, always going back to the author and her experiences and perspectives.

For those who grow up in Appalachia, there are no happily ever afters, only kinda-happily ever afters. You attempt to break the cycle while holding on to the beautiful, always feeling the pull of home. You may even have a rags to riches story, but some of the rags, and the bruises, are invisible.

Rodenberg writes brilliantly about being a woman with other people’s sins projected onto her (in addition to being constantly shamed for imaginary transgressions). This is a burden for women in religious societies worldwide. Her parents, particularly her father, veer between extremism and pure insanity on the religion spectrum, and her father passes along his feelings of inadequacy from his own father like a poisonous inheritance. Impossibly, love and faith survive.

Those of us who live here have been hoping for a memoir that would explain root causes of the suffering that makes so many in Appalachia turn to cults, or drugs, or politicians to relieve some of our pressure and pain. The author leaves out none of these root causes, whether we are talking about coal companies or grim poverty or multi-generational trauma. Nor does she omit any of Appalachia’s great strengths.

Some of the structure of “Kin” is spectacular: just when the reader is about to write off her father completely for the evils he has done, the very next chapter is his letters home from the Vietnam War. There is not a single portrait of Rodenberg’s kin that is not multifaceted, deep, and poignant.

I sometimes became confused about which relative was the focus of a chapter, but this is a minor flaw. This autobiography is as accomplished as it is astonishing. Written with respect and care, “Kin” stands among not only the best Appalachian memoirs ever written, but among the best American memoirs of recent times.… (mais)