Book review: Abilene by Dare DeLano

Black Coffee Book Tours

November 28 - December 01

Three strong Southern women — twelve-year-old Len, her mother Cora, and her Aunt Jean — grapple with love and loss in this poignant tale set on a hardscrabble cattle ranch in a small Texas town. Len yearns to find the father who abandoned her, and after a chance encounter with a country music star who she suspects is him, she embarks on a life-altering journey to find the truth about her past. At the same time, Cora and Jean must deal with another shocking family betrayal that complicates everything. Told in turns by these three remarkable women, Abilene explores the boundaries of love and the transformative power of self-discovery.

Link for the book on the publisher’s website

Universal link for the book on Amazon

About the author

Dare DeLano holds an MFA in creative writing from Fairfield University. Her work has been short-listed as a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, and her children’s book Odus and the Long Way Home won the San Diego Book Award. Her work has been published in “A Year in Ink Anthology, Vol. 10, San Diego Writers, Ink, and has been exhibited in the San Diego Central Library’s Local Author Exhibition. Dare lives in San Diego, but her heart remains in the south. This is her first novel.

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Review 

Len, Cora and Jean are three Southern women who have faced a lot of hardships in their lives. They live on a ranch in Texas, raising cattle and try to make ends meet.

Len is a curious girl with a gift who wants to know more about her father. He left when she was a baby and the only picture she has of him kept him alive in her mind. Through an impromptu meeting, she thinks she has found him in a famous singer and goes after him to learn the truth.

I liked the relationship between her and Cyclops, a reliable horse who was her confidant and friend in ways no one could be.

“And I knew in my bones she was right. For often, with the first winds of morning, I could feel how the day was gonna go. I could feel the long, strange cry of a wolf, or the glorious scream of the eagle, circling. At the beach I could hear the sailors’ words as they were carried along in cries of the seagulls.” Len.

Cora and Jean are sisters who have always been close, but they are shaken by a family secret that threatens to tear them apart. They each have their own struggles with love, loss, and forgiveness.

“There was a deep-inside part of her that was at home here in the house she’d grown up in, the fields where she’d spent countless hours as a child. But there was part of her that knew she never fit quite right in this town. Everywhere Cora went, she felt a little different from the pack. In her hometown, she was smarter and more worldly, at college, she was edgier and more rebellious, and with the party crowd she hung out with she was smarter and more ambitious. She felt she was pieced together from all these different sections, and nowhere did she feel completely whole, nowhere did she feel completely understood.” Cora.

Jean is on trial for manslaughter, and as she tries to adapt to prison life, she has to face her fears and the revelation of secrets. Secrets that could tare her family apart. As one continues to read, I could feel the empathy the writer used to tell these three women’s story.

“I’m not scared. Even if no one else was around and he tried something I don’t reckon I’d be scared. I am a master at detaching from my body. I understand how to just leave and not care what is happening to the flesh and bone and skin that is lying there below me. I been doing it for years, whenever Roger wanted me. Trying to feel something – – something like I used to feel when we first were dating, back when things were sweet and I would get a little thrill when he touched me.” Jean

Abilene is a story of three women, in two different time zones, who discover themselves and each other through their journey of finding home.

The writing is beautifully crafted, and the plot has an easy flow that makes this an enjoyable read from beginning to end.