Follow Me

The story of Sally Werner and her various incarnations is told by her granddaughter and namesake. Most of the story is told in Sally’s words and follows Sally from the age of 16 until her death.

One of the great pleasures of reading is discovering a new voice. Joanna Scott’s work is new to me but she’s certainly not a beginning writer. While most of Sally’s story is told in a straight forward manner, Scott is not afraid to mix things up a bit. She’ll combine narrative, internal thoughts, comprehension of the situation and snatches of conversation for some passages. In less skillful hands those passages could be a mess. Scott knows when to hold back.

Some books are easy reads that don’t require much attention and can be show more finished in an afternoon. When I read a book I often compare it to a loaf of bread or a meal trying to think of how to describe it. Follow Me is like a long lunch with many flavors incorporated into the dishes. It requires thoughtful attention and it’s so delicious you can’t help but get through it quickly. Some of Scott’s descriptions made me laugh because they are so unique. For example, “Uncle Mason’s whittling knife made a sound that reminded her of her younger brothers when they slurped soup.”

Follow Me is currently in the top 5 books I’ve read this year. It was an absolute pleasure (except for the sorrowful passages) from beginning to end. Thank you, Miriam, of the Hachette Book Group for introducing me to Joanna Scott. show less

Admittedly, Follow Me is a little slow at the beginning and somewhat difficult to get into, but I implore you to keep reading because it gets better and better with each page. The style of Ms. Scott’s writing is very distinct and present from the first page. Her use of verbs creating stand-alone sentences makes it seem that it is a dream we’re reading about, an urgent dream, sometimes a nightmare, from which Sally Werner wants to run away. It’s also like Tuskee River flowing north and outlining Sally’s journey through life. This writing is very intriguing and it kept me wanting to read more until I became absorbed by the book and couldn’t stop even if I wanted to, which I didn’t. The story of Sally’s life, her actions show more driven by the need to run away from town to town, her belief that she would always be haunted by leaving her son behind, are intoxicating. Without knowing when or how, I was pulled into the whirl of that river Sally had become and even when I wasn’t reading the book, it was constantly in my thoughts. Follow Me is so many things that one could really write a whole essay on it. Not only is it a saga spanning three generations, but also a tragic love story, a depiction of how much our lives are run by chances we’re not aware of and a tribute to the finest American storytelling of which I had been so unappreciative before Scott’s book landed in my hands. I do not like the term “modern classic”, but Follow Me might very well become one. show less

A disappointment, if you're--I'm--still looking for a "Manikin"-like experience. Scott does write beautifully again here, though. The fictitious Tuskee River maps the northward trajectory of the protagonist's life. Born Sally Werner to a backwoodsy, fanatically religious family, she is sort of raped by her cousin and gives birth to a boy she leaves in a basket on her parents' kitchen table and runs away. She's a dodgy gal of dubious moral distinction--never mind that she had the kid, dumping him and running is just the first of many decisions she attributes in her peculiar, self-justifying, prevaricating way to being swept along the river of Fate (she does--finally--briefly--question that notion). Rescued by a kind mountain family she show more then betrays by stealing the life savings of the sad old man who'd taken her in (but didn't he want her to have it? really? and after all, it's for the son she left behind), she becomes Sally Angel in another town, where she falls in love with a younger teenaged boy "Mole," who's killed after being run off the road by the loutish local rich kid who will become her next lover and the father of her second child, daughter Penelope. Long before the child is born, she'll have left loutish Benny sitting at a soda counter awaiting her return and reincarnated yet again in another town as Sally Mole. So it goes through the novel, till her final incarnation as Sally Bliss. Benny eventually knocks her teeth out and later gets her to rather casually sign over half-custody of Penelope (named after another friend who helped her that she'd never see again). She has a long-term affair with her attorney boss whose wife is going blind. They eventually marry. She destroys her daughter's happiness in, typically, somewhat good faith--having aided and abetted her blame-dodging relatives into making her fantasy real (with fake documentation) that the boy who's gotten her daughter pregnant is actually her long-lost son, so they can't be together. The boy will drunkenly fumble a suicide attempt and many years later discover the truth and get in touch with his daughter, Sally's namesake (who's apparently piecing this rather tall tale together into the present narrative--many hands at work fashioning Sally Werner's history). Her son, in fact, was beaten to death by his father while still an infant and buried in an unmarked grave--the entire family's motive for duplicity. Sally believes in magic fairy people who live in the river and sort of act as fate's angels...This plot strain--if it is one--never really takes off. Ultimately, I guess I consider it a good recommendation for the seemingly endless line of library patrons looking for books with a "strong woman character" (though I wouldn't want to look at that too closely...) and put it in the category of almost an adventure tale with Anderson's "Outlander" and Naslund's "Ahab's Wife." (There are no men of consequence in the multi-generational saga.) show less

FOLLOW ME
Joanna Scott, Little, Brown, 2009, $24.99/C$27.99, hb, 400pp, 9780316051651
When you layer a family saga with secrets and betrayal with a story containing a host of entangled relationships written by an author who expertly engages your attention till the end, why wouldn’t you want to read Follow Me?
The story begins in 1946 when Sally Werner, a naïve and recalcitrant farmer’s daughter from Pennsylvania heads out with her cousin Daniel one afternoon. She realizes too late that her motorcycle ride with Daniel and subsequent actions have left her pregnant. Unwilling to face the daily barrage of religious ramblings or the feelings of guilt caused by her parents’ pious gaze, she abandons her son and runs away. When looking show more for someplace to settle, Sally falls in love with a boy named Mole. After Mole is killed in a car accident, Sally learns she is pregnant. Her daughter, Penny Mole, grows up to become a successful lawyer and lives with her own daughter Sally, whose father left without provocation before her birth.
Sally’s granddaughter and namesake is keeper of the secrets and chronicler of her muddled multi-generational heritage of deceit and deception. Scott crafts a cadence of consequences as the pieces are joined, but always some part is missing, making the truth difficult to visualize.
Scott’s writing is pure magic. The plot she creates is like a tailor whose sharp needle weaves an intricate pattern of lines and keeps you guessing until the entire picture is uncovered. Follow Me is a celebration of life you will not want to end.
Wisteria Leigh show less

This book took me a while to read. Not because it is poorly written. It isn’t. The author’s style was simply one that caused me to pause and pay attention a little closer to what she was conveying. Sometimes the writing was poetic in tone, others a stream-of-consciousness that flowed along the page like the river that holds a prominent place within the story:

"Oh, but look at her crossing the Court Street Bridge in the drizzle, floating more than walking, not noticing the sidewalk stained with mud, the flattened cigarillo holder on the curb like the crushed carcass of a while beetle, or the river flowing below with a deceptive sluggishness toward the lip of the falls, its surface rust-tinged, as though there were a powerful flame show more burning in its depths. Strange to think that this same dirty, dreary river that she had followed from its source had led her to the place where she finally belonged."

At one point in the story I had one of those “Ah ha!” moments. You know the one: when you finally get a thought in your head about what you’ve been reading. It may not be what the author intended, but as a reader, it is my mindset that controls what I glean from a story as much as what the writer is relating.

For me, that thought was: Reinvention is a double-edged sword.

Young and impetuous, Sally faces her challenges by moving on and re-inventing herself each time one presents itself. As much as she is trying to protect herself and her daughter from the past, she is also keeping it at such a distance, that when she is forced to face it again, she can no longer see it clearly which leads to devastating consequences:

"My grandmother must have loved the way dizziness washed the thoughts and memories into a blur. As a young woman she spun through life the way she spun around in the teacup on the Bonville carousel. At pivotal moments she tended to act rashly, abandoning her plans without bothering to consider alternatives, moving so quickly from the location of trouble that she would lose track of how one thing was connected to another."

The chapters alternate between Sally Werner and her granddaughter whose name is also Sally. Scott has the reader alternating between Sally of the past and the one of the present, the younger helping to show the end result of the grandmother’s running and reinventions.

We are the product of many influences: external and internal, the end result of our decisions, actions, and reactions. Follow Me takes us on one woman’s journey through life as she deals with all of these.

This is a long book that I did have to put down occasionally. But not for long. Scott had me intrigued from the beginning, caring about her characters enough that I wanted to discover the truth as much as her granddaughter.

For this reason it is receiving 4 Stars out of 5. show less

Sally Werner, a Pennsylvania farm girl, decides to throw caution to the wind and take a ride on her cousin’s motorcycle. This choice will change her life forever. A teenager mother in 1946, she abandons her baby boy with her family and runs away to start a new life only a few miles away. Sally runs to escape the people she feels judges her for her mistakes. Yet the unfortunate nature of her life is that she always feels like she has to run away and start over again. Most of the time, this is the result of her own feelings of threat and failure. With each new place that Sally runs to, she adopts a new name, a name she feels will change her fortune and reflects something she has left behind or wishes to be.

Along the way Sally has show more another child, a daughter named Penelope. As Sally runs, so too does Penelope until Penelope meets auburn haired Abe and falls in love. Sally’s story is told by her namesake and granddaughter, the child of Penelope and Abe. Towards the end of the book, the shocking family ‘secret’ is revealed by Sally and drives Abe away.

Scott has a beautiful way with words. The imagery she uses to describe the world around Sally invokes a clear picture of the trickling Tuskee River and the small, rural Pennsylvania towns Sally hops to and from. There are times when Sally expresses a self-doubt and detachment that I have felt many times. I can see a lot of myself in Sally, especially in the way that she regards the world as a struggling outsider looking in, always waiting for her moment to feel connected. Sally’s internal dynamic is interesting as well because she is a contradicting mixture of strong and assured, but also weak and afraid. It takes a lot of guts to pick up and start over again, but Sally does this each time because she wants to escape the people around her. So, it’s hard to tell what Sally is and that makes her more realistic. Sally is a bundle of one inconsistency after another as most of us are.

Sally has a hard life, but she doesn’t make it any better for herself each time she runs away. The thing she is good at, singing, she purposefully stuffs away for a long time. Again, this is something that I find familiarity in. Sally is not without remorse for leaving her son behind, or for leaving some of the people who helped her early on as she was just getting on her feet. Even as she runs away, she always looks back on the people she has left behind.

I honestly enjoyed this book from page one. Since Sally’s life is cut up into chunks, each stage is paced just right that I didn’t feel any lag in the plot. As I said above, the descriptions are both beautiful and believable. Scott is a truly talented writer. With just a few words, she is able to evoke emotion and reality all in one breath. It takes talent to captivate, which Follow Me certain does. show less

Sally Werner is only sixteen years old in 1946 when an unexpected sexual encounter with her cousin Daniel results in the birth of a baby boy. On impulse, Sally abandons her baby on her parents’ kitchen table and flees, heading north along the fictional Tuskee River in Pennsylvania to seek a bigger life and leave her shame behind. Sally Werner recreates herself many times - changing her last name along the way (from Werner to Angel to Mole to Bliss), and starting her life over again each time fate delivers a bad hand.

More than sixty years later, the story of Sally’s life is retold by her granddaughter and namesake who has the benefit of pitting her grandmother’s story against another version…that of her biological father who one show more day sends her a package of tapes which reveal his side of the story.

Follow Me is a magical tale of one woman’s life and how her decisions impact others long after she is gone. Thematically, it is a novel about the selective process of memory and how history is defined by who is telling the story. Like the river which parallels Sally Werner’s life, Follow Me is filled with secrets and murky half-truths and things are never entirely how they first appear.

Joanna Scott is a gifted story teller. Her prose flows smoothly and the interconnected lives of her characters are revealed from several viewpoints. Embedded in the story of Sally is a larger story - that of the struggle of single women faced with unplanned pregnancies and the shame that often accompanies them. Sally is not a wholly likable character, and yet I found myself admiring her resilience and determination. Her mistakes, her desire for forgiveness, her effort to make things right again - all resonated with me.

My only complaint with the novel was its length. At times I felt impatient for the story to unravel faster. I wanted the secrets revealed sooner. Follow Me is a leisurely story. It meanders. But despite my impatience, I turned the final page with admiration for Scott’s writing, as well as a deeper understanding of her characters.

For readers who enjoy literary fiction, family sagas, and character-driven novels - Follow Me will appeal.

Recommended. show less