One of Literary Hub’s Favorite Books of the Year “Seethingly assured…like all the best horror, [Follow Me to Ground] is an impressive balancing act between judicious withholding and unnerving reveals.” –The Guardian A “legitimately frightening” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel about an otherworldly young woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of … woman, her father, and her lover that culminates in a shocking moment of betrayal.
“You’ve never encountered a father-daughter story like Rainsford’s slim debut” (Entertainment Weekly). Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals–or “Cures”–by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson–and they quickly strike up an affair. Soon, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her lover, and eventually she comes to a decision that will forever change Samson, the town, and the Ground itself.
“Visceral in its descriptions…this unworldly story is a well-crafted and eerie exploration of desire…beautifully intoxicating” (Shelf Awareness). In Ada, award-winning author Sue Rainsford has created an utterly bewitching heroine, one who challenges conventional ideas of womanhood and the secrets of the body. “A triumph of imagination and myth-bending…equal parts beauty and horror [Follow Me to Ground is] unlike anything you will read this year” (Téa Obreht).
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Umm…what did I just read? Will definitely need to re-read this dark yet beautiful yet creepy AF and disturbing book.
Usually I review romance, but this is NOT a romance. If you follow me because you like PNR, please note: THIS IS NOT PNR.
I recommend Follow Me to Ground if you can handle creepy-weird and kinda gross/descriptive body (like inside-the-body) imagery. I recommend it if you don’t mind ambiguity in endings and sometimes in dialogue (it was written without quotation marks and sometimes the missing dialogue tags prevented me from knowing who was speaking). I recommend it if you’re okay with twisted characters and storylines.
I still don’t know how I feel about it overall, but it totally gripped me and there’s no denying that whatever Rainsford set out to do, she did it very, very well.
Wait…what? Let me read that again. Opening “Follow Me to Ground” I stumble to get my footing… as Ada relays her story it dawns that something is off-kilter. I had to pay attention to fathom what was going on.
“…Because The Ground is moving…”
Ada and her father are healers for what they call the “Cures”, the local villagers. The people see them as peculiar but indispensable. The father runs through the woods like a bear. Ada steals the songs out of baby birds, although the Cures may not choose to grasp that. They both age slowly and do not eat. They heal people by opening them up, restoring internal organs, sometimes singing the afflictions out and– if the case calls for it– often the patient will be buried in the ground for a long, deep healing to complete.
“…something the Cures don’t know about their curing… the sickness isn’t gone…it just goes elsewhere…”
He and Ada are from The Ground. Ada tells how her father made her: “He mixed my parts together and planted me inside of a sack. He tied it shut with a rope and then lowered me down during a thunderstorm…” Conveniently, her father did not think to give her any sexual organs. Eventually, as Ada ages and begins longing for intimacy she wills the growth of the “opening” she calls her glove, pucker, or pouch and takes a lover, a boy named Samson. Her father does not approve of the relationship and especially objects to the way Ada has of “improving” Samson. A family conflict lies ahead.
You are going to want to read this book. Sue Rainsford has unleashed a strange world, possibly birthed from a living and squirming soil enriched by a folklore never recorded on paper before. An original tale. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
This was so freaking weird! Did I enjoy it? Heck yah! Could I even try to explain how or what this is about? Not coherently. And honestly that’s OK (to me). The writing was good, the characters were fascinating, and the story was odd and complex. Highly recommend!
Weird, but I really liked it.
What did I just read?
Should I burn the book? Probably not because my version is an ebook and we don’t burn books in this day and age (at least I don’t).
Wowzah, I chose this book from Netgalley because I saw a review from someone I follow on Goodreads and I thought, “I want that kind of baffled, scared sort of feeling myself.”
I don’t get scared reading books, (or watching movies), but this one I did need to read in small increments, perhaps not because of the scared factor, but there was a major ick thing going on.
Ada and her father don’t waste words, and so they talk in shorter sentences, which is actually a bit lyrical. This isn’t a conventional book, it isn’t an easy read because Samson is just *insert awful adjective here*, but it is a very vivid read. Ada’s “birth story” so to speak, it’s very telling, the lore involved in this is well-researched. Someone else wrote that this was an “unsettling novel” and I readily agree with that. I think this is going to be a hit or miss book for others, but I’ve loved reading all of the reviews.