Follow Me to Ground

Starred review from October 14, 2019
Brimming with dark folklore and underworld energy, Rainsford’s stellar debut features a memorable heroine chafing against her monstrous isolation. Ada and her father are vegetal creatures born of the Ground, a special patch of hungry earth that “gorge on bodies” and shapes “them to its own liking.” They are strange, slowly aging beings who live apart from the human population, or “Cures,” but are tolerated for their extraordinary healing capacity. Ada and her father can open up bodies and sing away sickness; the most serious cases are put into the Ground to heal, though the results are unpredictable. Rainsford excels in describing the grotesque beauty of this alternative medicine in which the humming healers feel their “way to the pitch of hurt.” The novel alternates between short sections in which various Cures describe their impressions of Ada, the lonely young creature with an “unseeded” heart, and Ada’s own narration of her rapturous affair with a young man named Samson. Ada tries to hide the romance from her disapproving father, who sees Samson’s longing for Ada, as well as his intense relationship with his pregnant sister, Olivia, as indicative of a diseased nature—too poisonous even for the Ground to cleanse. This is a subtle, unsettling novel in which desire is an ineradicable sickness that can be preferable to health. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners.

Starred review from November 1, 2019
An otherworldly young woman and her father cure townsfolk in this bewitching debut about desire, power, and the body. Ada and her father have lived outside the village for as long as anyone can remember. The strange pair don't seem to age, and they have extraordinary healing powers that come from The Ground. "The garden is long and mostly grass but back then, close to the house, we kept a patch of moist, fragrant soil," Ada recalls. "This was as much ground as Father had managed to tame, and it was where we put Cures that needed long, deep healing." With a sweep of her hand, Ada puts Cures, or sick people, to sleep and reaches inside their bodies to remove whatever illness lurks there, encouraging the sickness to clot in a bowl or slide down a drain. "This is something Cures don't know about their curing," Ada reveals. "The sickness isn't gone. It just goes elsewhere." When Ada falls for Samson, a handsome villager unafraid of what makes Ada different, Ada's father attempts to protect her. But Ada bristles at Father's accusation that Samson's fascination is dangerous, potentially even draining her healing abilities. Is Samson a worthy suitor, or is his attraction to Ada evidence of a different kind of illness? Will Ada's desire for erotic and personal freedom attract the scrutiny of villagers, putting her and Father in danger? Or--worse--distance her from Father forever? Rainsford pursues these questions with deft lyricism, weaving Ada's story with observations from townsfolk who are, by turns, grateful and wary. Rainsford's fairy and folktale sensibility blends seamlessly with horror as Ada's powers begin to shift in unpredictable ways and take on a darkness all their own. While Rainsford rushes to the novel's ambiguous conclusions, this is nevertheless an astonishing debut heralding the career of an exciting new writer. Strange, lyrical, and arresting, this novel will draw readers into its extraordinary spell.

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November 15, 2019
Rainsford's debut is a haunting novel about Ada and her father, who heal the Cures in the town nearby by breaking bodies open to use birdsong and other techniques to lure sickness out and into bowls or onto walls; and when the work is most delicate, they bury the Cures in the hungry, and dangerous, but magical Ground in their backyard. Everything has always been the same for the father-daughter pair for generations, but when Ada begins to date a local named Samson, both her father and Samson's pregnant, widowed sister Olivia must object. Rainsford fills her book with an artful, disconcerting prose that never quite allows the reader full access, bringing the surrealist, haunting dread to life and artfully mirroring the mixed feelings of the local Cures who both trust Ada and fear the legends about her. With an evocative novel bending fantasy into a universe of subtle horror and bodies cracking open to be healed, Rainsford pulls the reader into a frightening, tangible world of monstrosity, humanity, and healing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)