Advance Praise for Stray Voltage
In clear, simple language as plain and forthright as her Midwestern characters, Karen Garloch slowly builds her story of a farm woman named Hillie as if raising a barn: confidently, knowledgeably, without fuss, and with every local character, from children to neighbors, helping out. Yet what she constructs, beam by beam, proves to have a dark tangle of complexities hiding within its traditional shape. As Hillie, a traditional wife and mother, works to understand and confront a series of interrelated disasters, starting with the mysterious deaths of her family’s dairy cows, her efforts to act and to be taken seriously collapse the distance between the stereotypes of city life and country life, revealing just how inescapable are the human impulses that roil every household and community.
Carolyn Jack, author of The Changing of Keys
What a fine first novel Karen Garloch has given us, a story rooted in the nation’s heartland, flawless in its sense of character and place. Part medical mystery, and partly a tale of corporate greed and family values put to the test, this gracefully written page-turner will hold you in its gentle thrall until the final page is turned.
—Frye Gaillard, author of A Hard Rain and Heroes and Other Mortals
Karen Garloch weaves a gripping narrative about a farm family’s hardship and hope, about how one woman’s newly discovered power turns hardship into hope. Who has the power between a husband and a wife? Between friends? Between a public utility and the citizens in a community? Between men and women as ordained by religion? Stray Voltage is a wonderfully thoughtful and intelligent novel that reminds us just how complicated the balance in these relationships can be.
—Judy Goldman, author of The Rest of Our Lives: A Memoir
When cows begin dying on Hillie Schumacher’s dairy farm, the people and institutions Hillie has relied upon for help her whole life fail her. Unable to depend on her depressed husband, her conservative rural church, or those she thought were her friends, Hillie is forced to find within herself the strength and resourcefulness that will save her farm and her family. Readers of this fast-paced debut will delight in cheering Hillie on.
—Heather Newton, author of The Puppeteer’s Daughters
Stray Voltage is a vivid portrait of the joys and perils of farm life
and what it takes for the dutiful among us to stand up to the
disbelievers, the domineering—or the gossips in the next pew.
—Kathryn Schwille, author of What Luck, This Life
When Hillie and Fred Schumacher find their dairy cattle mysteriously dying off, they also find themselves shunned by their neighbors. Hillie begins to question the judgment of her husband and old friends as she strives to save her farm and family. In an impressive debut novel Stray Voltage, veteran journalist Karen Garloch goes beyond the facts, tapping into the charged currents underneath a place of 4-H Clubs, church lady meetings, county fairs and corn festivals—the contemporary Midwest too often ignored in today’s fiction. Readers will find a quiet yet moving tale of plain-faith people in the heartland, worthy of Willa Cather.
—Dale Neal, author of Floodmarks and Kings of Coweetsee