Vermont editor Angela Palm grew up in a struggling rural Indiana community on the banks of the Kankakee. The river had been straightened to yield farmland, but it frequently flooded back to its original shape, turning each house into an island. Palm's greatest happiness lay in her love for the boy next door; she fell asleep each night watching him through their bedroom windows. She dreamt of escaping her troubled home life, even without a clear idea of what escape might mean. And then the boy next door was sentenced to life in prison for a horrible crime.
Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here is Palm's exploration of her roots and her journey away from them. By a complicated and sometimes messy route, she escaped rural Indiana, but the separation remains incomplete. Even with a family and creative life of her own, far from her hometown, she is pulled back, perhaps most of all by that boy next door, Corey.
Palm's memoir is not only the story of her life and the divergent parallel life Corey has led, but also an examination of how place forms a person. Her writing is easy to read, compelling and draws the reader in with its momentum. Riverine is about self-determination, the origin of deviance, and places, particularly the liminal ones. "Fringe investigation was the science of my neighborhood and of my art." Palm's story is yet unfinished, but her memoir has an admirable structure and art of its own. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia