At times, Gwin’s prose is profound and Faulkner-ian in tone: “Time isn’t a river, Jo thought time is ground and dirt and the roots of ancient trees and the bones of past things. Though the story is generally well-paced, with foreshadowing placed nicely throughout, readers may become impatient once they’ve cracked the mystery that propels the plot. As each woman navigates the devastation of the city while looking for her family, Gwin explores how Tupelo’s black and white residents were treated differently in the aftermath while capably deploying flashback to reveal the history of each family and the violent moment that unites them. The story alternates between the perspectives of Dovey, the Grand’homme matriarch and a washerwoman, and Jo, the McNabbs’ teenage daughter, who encounter each other in a somewhat contrived moment after the tornado has passed through town. In her second novel, Gwin ( The Queen of Palmyra, 2010) attempts to provide a corrective by focusing on a black family, the Grand’hommes, and a white family, the McNabbs. But the black residents who lost their lives during the disaster were not included in the official count of the dead.
When a tornado struck the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, in April 1936, more than 200 people died. After a natural disaster, two families must confront the awful event that links them.
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