A new beginning A Contrary review by Cynthia Newberry Martin 
Old Border Road Susan Froderberg Little, Brown and Company 2010 Buy this book...> It’s not unusual for a character in a book to find herself in an unfamiliar place, but what is unusual is for a reader to experience firsthand the sensation of unfamiliarity as she reads about the character. In Susan Froderberg’s début novel, Old Border Road, the reader finds herself in the unfamiliar world of repetition. Repetition—which Froderberg wields like a wand, transforming familiar words into unfamiliar sentences. He has shown me the old adobe house outside and in and he has taken me riding across all the parceled acres of land that surround the house and he has told me the told-again stories born of the place and of his family and of him…Our start-up is done according to ritual, our send-off as to custom and trend…We say all the words supposed to be said and do all the things supposed to be done and we get all the things that one gets. Seventeen-year-old Katherine tells the story. Instead of saying we got married, she says, “I gather my veil and train, hitched to a great weight of dress…” Katherine is a girl whose “heart tumbles” inside her chest “like a stack of children’s blocks toppled to the floor.” She is a girl who enters the unfamiliar world of the old adobe house on Old Border Road, thinking it is “a place to be called home, a place to begin another beginning.” Old Border Road—just over the Mexico border on “this side, our side”—is where Son lives with his parents, Rose and Rose’s Daddy, and where Katherine will now live. Returning from the honeymoon, she sees the house “perched atop the hillock as it is, moated by emerald groves and all aglow with pale light.” In this new world, Katherine will meet Pearl Hart and Ham and Daughter Pearl. The Padre and the Quechan woman. Out of ten chapters, six of them take the name of a character. Only the Padre calls Katherine by her name, “taking care of all of her syllables.” And more. In her new world, she is just Darlin’, Girl, and Dear Girl—no name that is hers or that claims any relationship. If you want lots of action, this is not the book for you. Here, there’s naming and wanting and a dry spell. The water truck appears from the distance “like some indomitable biblical creature lumbering down the road and aripple in the heat.” Then not wanting and a claiming of names. The story lies under the words and you have to feel for it. I head down the steps and around back toward the tackroom, on into a morning like every morning here is, one hard to tell from any other one, in what’s become a consistent and cloudless lack of variation, in a land of forever seeming but one season, where everything is the same and still, where the stretch from here to the outlines of foothills is as bleak and empty and colorless as any loneliness would be. Over time, however, this thick layer of language, which repeats and repeats and which echoes the daily repetitiveness of Katherine’s new life, sometimes acts like the thick layer of dust that covers Old Border Road, burying the story and its characters too deep, weighing them down like the unrelenting heat of the drought. “How you move is who you are,” Katherine tells us in Chapter Seven, presaging an unexpected occurrence near the end of the story. The final pages of the novel take place away from Old Border Road, at a hospital where magic doors breathe out two men in pastel-colored pajamas—a new unfamiliar world for Katherine. The reader senses it will not be the last. Susan Froderberg takes words and shapes them into voice. She takes an old adobe house and turns it into place. Over the procession of pages, she creates “something new to put inside a place that fits right and holds inside us.” Susan Froderberg’s Old Border Road is a new beginning. Cynthia Newberry Martin is Contrary’s Review Editor. Tip Jar | Bookstore | Index of Reviewshttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0316098779WritersFund.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20Reviews.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/0316098779shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3

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