The Ash Family: A Novel

On the Ash family farm, there’s a rule: Stay three days, or stay forever. Berie arrives on the farm after meeting Bay, a member of the family, on her trip to her freshman year of college. On the farm, she learns the family’s other rules: don’t be possessive, because no one belongs to anyone else; accept the new name that the leader of the family gives you; don’t talk about your past or anyone else’s. As time wears on, Berie grows accustomed to the hard labor, scavenged food, and radical ethic of the family, slowly coming to believe that her past pales in comparison to living with the nature and the truth she finds with the family.

Dektar is skillful in her portrayal of a vulnerable young person yielding to a cult-like dynamic. The horrors of what such an environment can produce are passed off by her narrator as dizzying but justifiable, making for a reading experience that is simultaneously frightening and fascinating. For the entirety of the novel, the reader waits for a moment that comes finally at the novel’s close with a kind of understated realism that is both underwhelming and just right.