Don't Say We Didn't Warn You
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Two sisters unite to survive a traumatic upbringing—from absentee parents to a wilderness camp for troubled teens—in this “relentless and spooky” (Joy Williams) debut novel from an essential new voice.
“A story that’s so weird, it has to be true. . . . Keeps our attention in a chokehold.”—The New York Times
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Good Housekeeping
“When the Juvenile Transportation Services come for you in the night in a preordained kidnapping, complete with an unmarked van and husky guardsmen you can’t outmatch, you have been sold for a promise.”
A young woman thinks she has escaped her past only to discover that she’s been hovering on its edges all along: She and her younger sister bide their time in a dilapidated warehouse in a desolate town north of New York City; their parents settled there with dreams of starting an art commune. But after the girls’ father vanishes, all traces of stability disappear for the family, and the girls retreat into strange worlds of their own mythmaking and isolation.
As the sisters both try to survive their increasingly dark and dangerous adolescences, they break apart and reunite repeatedly, orbiting each other like planets. Both endure stints at the Veld Center, a wilderness camp where troubled teenage girls are sent as a last resort, and both emerge more deeply warped by the harsh outdoor survival experiences they must endure and the attempts by staff to break them down psychologically.
With a mesmerizing voice and uncanny storytelling style, this is a remarkable debut about two women who must struggle to understand the bonds that link them and how their traumatic history will shape who they choose to become as adults.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two sisters navigate childhood trauma in Dixon's chilling, complex debut. In a dilapidated town north of New York City in the early 2000s, the unnamed teenage narrator wrangles with her younger sister, Fawn, who becomes obsessed with being on camera after appearing on the news for discovering a severed human foot in the woods. After the narrator's best friend dies in an accident, the narrator's frequently absent mother enrolls her in a residential program for troubled teens called the Veld Center. In Veld's custody, the narrator spends months hiking before settling into the strange rhythms and corrosive cliques of the treatment facility. Dixon slowly reveals the details of the sisters' upbringing and of the narrator's dehumanizing stint at Veld while moving ahead to the narrator's early 20s, when she's in a relationship with an older woman. There are clues early on that all is not well with Fawn (the narrator's mother elliptically warns her Fawn is "on the brink"), and she does her own stint at Veld until she's 18. When Fawn comes back to town using a false name, the narrator braces for whatever destruction she will bring in her wake. At times this can feel dizzying, but in the end the layered story lines and Fawn's shocking actions pay big dividends. Readers will be eager to see what the author does next.
