Groundskeeping

January 3, 2022
Cole’s nimble debut combines elements of Southern fiction, the campus novel, and youthful romance. Twenty-eight-year-old Owen Callahan, an aspiring writer, returns to his native Kentucky in 2016 after being semi-homeless in Colorado. He takes a job as a groundskeeper at Ashby College, where he audits a writing workshop and meets Alma Hadzics, the daughter of Bosnian immigrants. Alma has already published a book of short stories and is at Ashby on a fellowship. Alma has a sort of boyfriend, and she and Owen drift into a relationship that slowly becomes more serious. Inevitably, he introduces her to his dysfunctional family and she introduces him to her prosperous mother and father. Owen’s uncle Cort is a MAGA-lover, and Alma’s parents always have MSNBC on. In the end, it’s not politics that threatens to derail Owen and Alma’s romance but fealty to their own professional aspirations as Owen’s literary career begins to take off. Cole fills his novel with a gallery of fascinating supporting characters such as Owen’s conspiracy theorist coworker Rando; Owen’s grandfather, a WWII vet who keeps a VHS collection of classic westerns; and Alma’s Springsteen-loving father. And though Owen makes some questionable choices, he and Alma make for an odd couple worth rooting for. In the end, this is the strongest story about young writers in love since Andrew Martin’s Early Work.

Starred review from February 15, 2022
An aspiring writer returns to his home state of Kentucky and meets a woman who will change his perspective--and his trajectory. "I've always had the same predicament. When I'm home, in Kentucky, all I want is to leave. When I'm away, I'm homesick for a place that never was," Owen, the narrator of Cole's charming debut novel, tells us in the book's opening lines. This is also what Owen drunkenly tells Alma the night he meets her at a grad-student party in the foothills outside Louisville, where he works as a groundskeeper, tending to trees on the campus of a small private college, and Alma is a visiting writer. Well-read yet rudderless, Owen, too, has literary aspirations, taking copious notes on his life to use in his work; his humble job at the college allows him to take a writing class for free. Having returned to his home state following a stint working dead-end jobs and partying in Colorado and disinclined to move in with either of his divorced parents, whose kindness is eclipsed, in Owen's mind, by their religious fundamentalism and political conservatism, Owen is living rent-free in his genial grandfather's basement, watching movies with the old man and butting heads with his unemployed uncle, Cort, who, at 52, has failed to launch. Owen seems in danger of getting equally stuck. Enter Alma, whose background couldn't be more different from Owen's rural, working-class upbringing. Alma was raised in a liberal, loving, upper-middle-class home in an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.; attended Princeton; and, at age 26, has found acclaim as a fiction writer. Yet her childhood was not without its challenges: A Bosnian Muslim, she was born in Sarajevo and came to America with her family to escape the war. Owen and Alma gradually fall in love, and their culture-bridging connection alters Owen, ultimately allowing him to learn and grow. But Cole's novel is more than a love story or a coming-of-age tale. Written with superb attention to detail and subtle emotional complexities, the book also offers a lovingly nuanced look at America--its longtime residents and recent immigrants; its ramshackle rural beauty, urban revival, and suburban safety; and its generous opportunities for reinvention. In the end, it is a love letter to home. Perceptive and endearing, this novel signals the arrival of a talented new voice in fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 1, 2021
At a time when the Trump brand of brashness is on the rise, Owen Callahan is back in his native Kentucky after an unsuccessful forestry stint in Colorado. The drug problem is behind him, but Owen has to remake himself from scratch. Settling in with his grandfather in a derelict house, Owen does groundskeeping work at a local private college. He enrolls in a writing workshop, which he hopes will be the first step to a career. Forever trying to escape his Kentucky roots, Owen finds inspiration in Alma Hadzic, an author-in-residence whose Muslim Bosnian heritage is endlessly appealing. "I'd spent too much of my life with people from Kentucky, whose failures and crutches and small joys were predictable, precisely because they were mine as well," Owen says. "For most of my life, I'd wanted to get away from that, which is to say I wanted to get away from myself. Being with Alma--listening to her--I could forget, momentarily, who I was and where I was from." But can a relationship built on vast differences survive? With brilliant descriptions of the rural South, Cole's slow burn of a debut novel achingly explores the definition of home, fate, and our shared humanity.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.