The Road to Dalton - Shannon Bowring - ★★★★.¼

AUTHOR: Shannon Bowring

GENRE: Literary Fiction

RATING: 4.25 stars.

In a Nutshell: A haunting debut work, that offers a character study of various residents of a small town. Intricately written, slow paced. Great for literary fiction lovers.

Story Synopsis:

Rose: A woman who stays with her abusive fiancé, hiding her bruises from her two sons and the rest of the townsfolk.

Richard Haskell: A doctor who fulfils his medical vocation out of compulsion than out of interest.

Trudy Haskell: Married to Richard, but in love with ‘best friend’ Bev – a fact known to and ignored by her husband as their town will never accept a lesbian relationship.

Nate: Bev’s son, a cop who is too goodhearted to be a cop.

Bridget: Nate’s wife, who is battling PPD without anyone being aware of her inner turmoil.

Alice: A newlywed who can’t seem to make her mother-in-law happy.

Greg: An overweight teenager who battles the strange feelings he has for two of his friends.

These are just a few of the complicated characters you will meet on the ‘Road to Dalton’. The plot focusses on the emotions, growth, losses and learnings of the above characters and those in their lives.

The prologue sets the right feel for the plot, though it is written in second person and addressed to the reader. Though the rest of the book is in third person, the prologue doesn’t feel like a misfit at all. Rather, it creates the perfect picture of what the fictional town of Dalton, Maine, such that when the first chapter begins, we get a feel of the town even before knowing the characters.

Literary fiction is heavily dependent on character sketching, and this book gets everything spot on in terms of creating characters with believable personalities. I was enthralled by the well-sketched characters, each of whom was like an iceberg – what we could see was only a part of the surface, and their hidden depths held many secrets.

What further enhances this experience is the structure of penning the narrative. Each chapter focusses on a specific character and the close persons in their life. Thus the third person narration keeps moving across characters as the chapters go by. In a way, it's like we are actually on a road in Dalton, peeking into a specific character’s day(s) and after watching them for a while, moving on to the next character in the subsequent chapter. While this is a bit tricky at the start because of the number of characters, things soon become clearer and characters become more familiar because of the detailed insight into individual thoughts. The choice to have longer chapters also works in favour of this approach, as the narrative doesn’t feel jumpy.

Through the various characters, the book covers several heavy themes such as postpartum depression, infidelity, homosexual relationships and homophobia, fat shaming, vocational troubles, marital struggles, domestic abuse, confusion with sexual orientation,… While this looks like too much for a book, the author handles them deftly. I never felt like the kitchen sink of themes had been thrown at me yet again because each character dealt with only one issue. So the character portrayal remained consistent rather than convoluted.

The town of Dalton is almost like a separate character unto itself. The author captures the small town ethos perfectly, where everyone knows everyone and everything about everyone else, but are unaware of the issues in their own home. Gossip and inquisitiveness stand proudly next to empathy and friendship in Dalton.

Most of this book was outstanding. The only minor points where it could have worked better for me were:

1. Mentioning the year before the prologue or the first chapter instead of referring to it only in the blurb. The plot did feel historical but only on reading the blurb did I realise it was set in 1990.

2. Either cutting out Greg’s character or linking him better with the rest of the characters. For a book filled with adult issues, his track was a misfit, though it was handled decently well later in the book. (And yes, I have to admit that a small town will also have teen problems.) But the rest of the themes were so strong that his felt somewhat rudimentary.

I was hooked right from the prologue, and until about half the book, my attention was unwavering. Then the slowness of the pace bogged me down somewhat. I still enjoyed the book tremendously, and still can’t believe this is a debut work. Such nuanced and consistent character development is something even established authors fail at sometimes.

Strongly recommended to literary fiction lovers. It is a slow-paced character-driven work, as is common with this genre, but the characters, the small-town vibes, and the story structure make the journey into Dalton a memorable one.

My thanks to Kristi Bontrager of Europa Editions and Edelweiss+ for the DRC of “The Road to Dalton”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

Content warnings: Whatever I have mentioned in the themes, plus suicide.