Follow Me: A Novel

Follow Me: A Novel

On a summer day in 1946 Sally Werner, the precocious young daughter of hardscrabble Pennsylvania farmers, secretly accepts her cousin's invitation to ride his new motorcycle. Like so much of what follows in Sally's life, it's an impulsive decision with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. Soon she abandons her home to begin a daring journey of self-creation, the truth of which she entrusts only with her granddaughter and namesake, six decades later. But when young Sally's father--a man she has never known--enters her life and offers another story altogether, she must uncover the truth of her grandmother's secret history. Boldly rendered and beautifully told, in FOLLOW ME Joanna Scott has crafted a paean to the American tradition of re-invention and a sweeping saga of timeless and tender storytelling. Scott, her literary gifts recognized with MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, is profoundly attuned to humankind’s endless quest to channel life’s wildness. In this enrapturing saga of an invincible woman who transforms herself the way a landscape changes with the seasons, Scott draws on a matrix of mythic themes and pastoral sensibilities to explore age-old conflicts between willfulness and powers beyond our control. Sally Werner, the daughter of harshly religious German immigrants, is a lovely, hardworking 16-year-old in 1946 in rural Pennsylvania. She can’t resist her war-veteran cousin’s offer of a motorcycle ride, or ward off his advances, but she does have the mettle to leave her newborn son and run away to seek her fortune. Dazzling descriptions are interrupted by heart-revving suspense as Sally finds refuge and trouble in struggling small towns, charming people with her glorious singing and fleeing whenever danger looms. As is her wont, Scott bends time as Sally’s granddaughter pieces together her family’s fractured history of violent passion and indelible guilt helplessly enacted in a place of misery, beauty, and mystery. --Donna Seaman "Lyrical. . . . Scott, whose previous novels have been finalists for both the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner awards, excels in her stream-of-consciousness descriptions of the mysterious Tuskee that provides Sally's true north." ( Washington Post Caroline Preston ) "[Scott] has here fashioned a densely stitched crazy quilt of a story...there's a lusciousness to all the excess, an egalitarian sensibility in keeping with the most quintessential aspects of American mythology." ( New York Times Book Review Leah Hager Cohen ) "Joanna Scott has one of those imaginations that recasts details in her own image. . .You think it must be her story, the story of her ancestors, but then you remember she's an accomplished fiction writer. She knows how to ride and break a good, feisty story. After it's broken, and the pieces lay all around, you realize that you could not, in a million years, ever reconstruct it, even though, in so many ways, it has become your story too." ( Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds ) Joanna Scott is the author of nine books, including The Manikin , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Various Antidotes and Arrogance , which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed Make Believe , Tourmaline , and Liberation . A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Award, she lives with her family in upstate New York. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Caroline Preston Who of us hasn't indulged in the daydream of running away and reinventing ourselves? Just slam the door on that messy household, wander down the road and start fresh with a new identity in a white-walled studio apartment. Even if we aren't brave enough, or foolish enough, to chuck it all, we're drawn to fictional characters who have -- from Hawthorne's Wakefield to Ann Tyler's fugitive housewife. In her lyrical new novel, "Follow Me," Joanna Scott traces the meandering path of a runaway girl from place to place, name to name, starting as 16-year-old Sally Werner in 1947 rural Pennsylvania. Her saga begins with an innocent motorcycle ride with an older cousin at a church picnic, which results in a baby son and rejection by her fundamentalist parents. She decides her only option is escape, following the Tuskee River that snakes across the Werners' back fields. "Running, running, running, because that's what a girl does who has left her baby in a basket on top of the kitchen table, like a pile of fresh-baked biscuits. . . . How many lives start over this way, by putting one foot in front of the other?" Over the next four decades, she washes up in towns farther along the Tuskee, surviving on the kindness of strangers -- a bundle of cash from an elderly farmer, a free bed from a lush, a typist job from a lawyer who has a crush on her. But every time Sally catches a glimpse of security and happiness, tragedy strikes, usually at the hand of a man: A lover is killed in an accident,