CW: This novel contains scenes depicting the sexual assault and abuse of a child.
If you grew up in the Deep South, the sound of cicadas and the rustling of Spanish moss in the afternoon wind will be as familiar to you as the air you breathe. If you’re not from the South, and you have no idea what I’m talking about, then pick up Bastard Out of Carolina and you will feel like you’ve spent your entire life in the South Carolina backcountry. Dorothy Allison’s 1992 novel absorbs traditional Southern gothic tropes and repurposes them to create a haunting, bittersweet story that will stick in your brain long after you’ve reached the back cover. The novel focuses on Bone, a young girl who grows up in an impoverished, tight-knit family near Greensboro, South Carolina. Allison creates a world at the beginning of the novel that enfolds you in the smell of Bone’s grandmother’s cooking, the playful screams of her cousins running rampant through the front yard, and the boisterous banter of her many aunts and uncles. In beautifully vivid prose, Dorothy Allison makes you count yourself among the members of Bone’s family after the first few chapters. Her ability to build this world and create characters that feel so real is the strong point of the novel.
Allison shatters this picturesque world just as masterfully as she built it- when Bone’s mother, Anney, marries “Daddy Glen,” who begins to sexually molest Bone. Anney sides with Glen, who keeps her financial afloat, once she discovers the horrific abuse. Family loyalties are tested as a result, and Bone must find a way to escape the vicious cycle of sexual violence while keeping her family intact. The criminal element of the novel is not framed around a police investigation. The novel’s crime, a truly evil one, is Daddy Glen’s abuse of Bone.
Describing a book that contains graphic depictions of sexual violence as “beautifully written” could feel like a minimization of Bone’s haunting experiences. But Bastard Out of Carolina is beautifully written. The sweet language of the idyllic South doesn’t clash with the pointed prose covering the abuse. They work together to create a novel where every word has meaning and none of them are replaceable. It creates a book that I was not able to put down until, in one day, I had read it from front-to-back. The graphic scenes are gut-wrenching, but never over-wrought or unnecessary. Dorothy Allison has written a book that is beautifully tragic, strangely captivating. I felt almost ashamed for being so entertained by the story of a girl whose childhood and innocence were taken from her. But I take it as a mark of a truly great book that I was able to have these two conflicting feelings at once. I was even more concerned with my own glee when I read that this novel is semi-autobiographical, based on Allison’s own childhood abuse in South Carolina. The world feels so real because it is real to the author. And now it’s real to the reader.
I cannot recommend Bastard Out of Carolina enough to anyone who’s a fan of the Southern gothic genre or is looking for an enhanced, grittier version of To Kill a Mockingbird. This book will stick with me for a while, and I hope that one day I’ll be fortunate enough to remember that it’s sitting somewhere on a bookshelf so that I can pick it up and travel to Bone’s world once again.
Rating: 4.5/5 Stars