Sorrowland - Outside of a Dog

hardcover, 320 pages

Published May 4, 2021 by MCD.

A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction

Vern - seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised - flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in …

A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction

Vern - seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised - flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future - outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

3 editions

reading crustacean reviewed Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon

good writing, dark mood, weird plot arc

4 stars

It's a good read but i put it away for some months because it is so gritty and dark and that's not how i like my escapism sometimes. also, it felt like the plot didn't really get going for a long stretch in the middle and then everything rushed to an end. anyway, it has a lot of truly beautiful, poetic sentences which sometimes almost made me cry. i loved the characters, and the writing of queerness and queer sex. i read "the deep" by the author before and liked it a lot, so maybe my expectations were a bit too high for this one.