THE KNOWING

In this supernatural-tinged romance, a teenager on a Georgia farm falls hard for the unwelcome new girl in school—a Northerner.

In this novella, an elderly JB Straton in the town of Bulwark reminiscences about his dead wife, Ellie. The story takes readers back a half-century to the 1960s, when Ellie Bronson and her family are newcomers to Georgia. JB, a high school senior and the star linebacker on the football team, can’t stop thinking about the new female student, who’s a junior. He has a feeling, which his grandmother would have called “the Knowing,” that he and Ellie belong together. Despite his doubts that a Northerner would be interested in a boy living on a peanut farm, JB enters into a romantic relationship with Ellie. The two fall in love, but not everyone approves, such as Ellie’s brother, whose warning to stay away from his sister is decidedly unfriendly. Nevertheless, JB is later ecstatic that his athletic prowess offers him a chance to go to college. But Ellie is upset because it means the couple will be apart for years. She seems to cut off contact when JB is away, and it’s a long while before he learns what’s happened to her. This novella opens an eight-part anthology, each volume written by a different author—though all will be based on Lunden’s (Bulwark, 2018) preceding book. In this first installment, Lunden hints at the supernatural, like a woman in the present day claiming Ellie was a witch. But these intimations remain hazy and largely unexplained, including JB’s recurring dream of being on a Civil War battlefield with Ellie tending to his wounds. The engaging tale’s centerpiece is the teens’ romance, with a Southern setting the author masterfully captures. Ellie, for example, is an outsider to the seemingly isolated locals while JB sees his family as “dirt-poor”—since cultivating peanuts is “like farming dirt.” The unadorned prose and concise descriptions make for a quick read all the way to the bittersweet ending.

A short but undeniably charming love story.