San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
mother, Lucy Maud, and hangs out with Carla, who is something of a wannabe witch.
Then on that May day in 2015, the rains come after a long drought. Isaac goes missing, and Boyd knows he is in grave danger.
On a harrowing journey in search of her friend, she encounters spaces that awaken her powers of perception. Ghosts emerge and point the way to history’s wretched litany of dark chapters that remain otherwise silent or silenced.
For the rest of us, Boyd imparts the many ways we have ravaged our earth.
While the title of the novel is a mouthful, it’s kind of perfect in illustrating a hard fact: If you grew up around here, if you had a point of reference, you would appreciate the history of this place, its hidden secrets and all it has to offer. Then you would know just how much the land has changed — is changing — and how much we already have lost because of our own lack of awareness or attention.
The novel does what good literature manages to do. It tackles the challenges we face as a society, leaving answers behind for future generations.
Dinan, who was born in Austin and worked as an elementary school teacher in San Antonio for a time, says she was motivated to create the story because “climate change is really pressing.”
“I was also very connected to this world in the Hill Country,” she said in an interview from her home in Costa Rica. “I don’t want to say that it’s disappearing, because obviously it is still there, but it’s very, very different than it used to be.”
More surreal elements emerge. A scarecrow comes to life, lassos of vines festoon a house where a mother cares for her bedridden daughter, and ghosts line the path of Boyd’s perilous journey. They are ultimately inextricable from the realistic elements of the novel.
“Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here” shows that we don’t just accept evidence of climate change or other disasters that befall us. We learn from them in order to move toward the future.
“I realize that my primary obsession when I’m writing is how the past is layered onto the present and how it affects the present in ways that we don’t see,” Dinan said.
She shows us through Boyd that we have to really look to see. We have to immerse ourselves in the spaces and see what’s changed.
Good fiction can move us through imagined spaces to show us our truths. This novel instructs us on the ways that the first step toward change is caring enough about it to confront it.
Yvette Benavides is a professor of creative writing at Our Lady of the Lake University. She cowrote the book “San Antonio 365: On this Day in History” (Trinity University Press) with David Martin Davies.