Shannon Bowring opens her debut, The Road to Dalton, by immersing readers directly in the loneliness of small town life. “Imagine this,” she writes. “You are driving along on a road in Northern Maine. Your head’s still humming from the monotonous drone of I-95 that empty highway. On the radio, nothing but static and outdated country music.” The singular tone of these sentences—monotonous and empty—is how Bowring immediately conveys the emotional tenor of the novel. In a second person address, a deliberate choice that implicates the reader, she writes, “You wonder why you took this road at all.” 

The Road to Dalton is an exploration of that doubt. Why do people live in small towns? What keeps them there? Bowring probes the push and pull of small-town life—its stifling closeness and intense scrutiny, but also its unrivaled sense of community and support. For better and worse, the small town’s tight web connects everyone caught within it.

Readers are first introduced to Richard, a country doctor who, because of his job, knows many of the other characters’ problems. He is revered and respected in town; at home, less so. His marriage lacks passion and desire. As he dresses for the New Year’s Eve party that opens the book, he longs for his white doctor’s coat: “At least then he could hide behind something familiar, put up a thin layer of protection between himself and the world.” Meanwhile his wife, Trudy, has found happiness in a more-than-meets-the-eye friendship with her best friend, Bev. But there is ambivalence for Richard too. He scrutinizes their relationship: “He’s not sure what he loves about her now. Her familiarity, he supposed, or perhaps her loyalty. Or maybe those are the things he can’t stand. He can never keep it straight, this delicate act of a discontented marriage, the silent agreements they’ve made to remain together.” Richard’s feelings become a metaphor for what it is to live a life in the same place—what it means to be loyal. 

The rookie cop, Nate, might be one of the most fascinating characters in the book. As a police officer who grew up in Dalton, he (like Richard) has ties to almost every other character’s story; we are privy to his deepest, most secret thoughts as well as what others think of him. Nate is busy reconciling his youth, including the townspeople’s grand expectations for him, with the position of authority in which he finds himself in as an adult in Dalton. He struggles to support his new family, with a colicky new baby, and his wife, Bridget, who has sunk deeper into postpartum depression than anyone realizes. As Nate discovers, the biggest ruse of adulthood is the illusion of control. Kids see adults, in their position of dominance, as people who have it all figured out, who are in control of all aspects of their lives and get whatever they want. Probably the ugliest rite of passage is learning this control is a façade. Everyone in Dalton, like everyone everywhere, is just trying to keep it together.

The people of Dalton ask the questions we all ask: Am I happy? Am I loved? Wrestling with his feelings for both his long-time best friend Angela and for her popular and handsome boyfriend, Greg, an overweight teenager, “feels stupid, cold, hungry, huge.” Hiding her love for Trudy from Richard, Bev understands what Aroostook County had taught not just her but everyone who grew up in Dalton: “The silent, constant, compulsive guarding of one’s biggest feelings, regrets, and desires.” These characters have secrets, but they have learned and are learning how to be themselves. As Bowring paints their dual lives—public and private—she attends to what it’s like to live within the watchful scrutiny of a small town. 

If Dalton’s residents are driven by self-preservation, they are also motivated by loyalty to each other and to their commitments to lives they aren’t sure how to escape or even whether they want to. Rose stays with her abusive husband; Bev’s husband stays despite his burgeoning awareness of his wife’s amorous relationship with her best friend. The characters go to great lengths to keep these feelings, and more, hidden in the name of self-preservation—a strategy that works better for some than for others. Both endearing and engaging, their vulnerabilities are what makes The Road to Dalton such an important debut.

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Shannon Bowring lives in Maine. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and a Best of the Net, and was recently selected in Best Small Fictions. The Road to Dalton is her first novel.

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Darcie Abbene is a writer, book reviewer, and editor living in northern Vermont. Her writing appears in Tupelo Quarterly, Whitefish Review, Split Rock Review, Parhelion Literary, and Kirkus Reviews, among other places.