Short Synopsis
Angela Palm presents her memoir, Riverine.

Full Synopsis
Angela Palm grew up in a place not marked on the map, her house set on the banks of a river that had been straightened to make way for farmland. Every year, the Kankakee River in rural Indiana flooded and returned to its old course while the residents sandbagged their homes against the rising water. From her bedroom window, Palm watched the neighbor boy and loved him in secret, imagining a life with him even as she longed for a future that held more than a job at the neighborhood bar. For Palm, caught in this landscape of flood and drought, escape was a continually receding hope.

Though she did escape, as an adult Palm finds herself drawn back, like the river, to her origins. But this means more than just recalling vibrant, complicated memories of the place that shaped her, or trying to understand the family that raised her. It means visiting the prison where the boy that she loved is serving a life sentence for a brutal murder. It means trying to chart, through the mesmerizing, interconnected essays of Riverine, what happens when a single event forces the path of her life off course.

"Combining lyrical prose with a haunting narrative, Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize–winner Palm recounts a story filled with secret longings, family history, and musings on what might have been. . . . This is a memoir to linger over, savor and study." ---Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"Haunting . . . Densely symbolic, unsentimental, and eloquent . . . An intelligent, evocative, and richly textured memoir." ---Kirkus Starred Review

"In deliberate yet beautiful prose, Palm recounts how her childhood, even the land itself, has affected her." ---Booklist

“[Palm’s] writing is easy to read, compelling and draws the reader in with its momentum." ---Shelf Awareness

Publishers Weekly Review

Kirkus Review