Dry Land

by B. Pladek

As the Great War rages across Europe, Rand Brandt, an idealistic young forester in the northwoods of Wisconsin, discovers a remarkable gift: his touch can grow any plant in minutes. Overjoyed, he dreams of devoting his life to conservation, restoring to its former glory a landscape devastated by lumbering. At night, Rand tests his powers, pushing his physical limits and revealing his secret only to his lover, Gabriel. But his frequent absences from camp don’t go unnoticed, and it isn’t long before Rand is drafted to grow timber for the war effort. Along with Gabriel, he’s shipped to France—though the army is a dangerous place for two men in love. 

While at camp, Rand also realizes the true price of his gift: everything he grows withers and dies, leaving the soil empty of all living matter. Horrified, he throws himself into ever more self-destructive trials, buckling under the pressure of so many secrets. In order to survive, he must confront the terrifying possibility that his gift is actually a curse, upending everything he believes about nature, love, and himself.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Historical, Historical Fiction, Queer, Adult

264 pages, Paperback

Published September 26, 2023

About the author

B. Pladek is a writer based in Wisconsin and associate professor of English at Marquette University.

Reviews

[Spencer Orey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully grounded nature magic. I was blown away by the seamless use of really deep research here and how fully worlded this book felt, in changing philosophies around conservation and forestry and the stifling gender repression of the war times, all through these characters that I wanted to thrive. It's touching and smart, and I love how the magic here feels so limited but raises big hopeful mysteries about what could be.

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. I absolutely loved this historical novel about plants and places and what it means to love or heal or make something. And how complicated and made-up an idea like wilderness is. And wildness and forests and the very hard very slow very painful work of becoming, which you can only do by doing it, no tricks. Also the quietest queer love story. Queer nature writing at its best, really. This story about a gay forester, this queer man whose life is deeply centered around birds and trees, whose heart belongs to quiet rural places—it's everything to me, a thousand more, please.

[Bogi Takács]

Finished a while ago, just forgot to update (sorry!)

I thought it was great; review coming closer to launch, G-d willing (pls remind me if I forget)

Updated to add: Reviewed it for Reckoning!
_____
Source of the book: Print ARC from publisher

[max theodore · Rating 4 out of 5]

^ dry land: a summary.

i am biased about this book, because i know and am a major fan of dr. pladek as a person. nevertheless, i am serious when i say this book is an intricate beautiful masterwork and its conversation with the concept and appeal of martyrdom makes me want to retch on the floor. this is a book about a gay forester in world war one who has plant magic, but it's really about how sometimes you just want to die gloriously and tragically and save the world while doing so, and that idea is really attractive but unfortunately you can't achieve beautiful narrative catharsis tragedy and if you try too hard you will just kind of ruin your life mundanely. also, capitalism and consumerism are destroying the planet. also also, gay sex is awesome.

some scattered points:

- pladek's prose is absolutely insanely gorgeous. this book took me much longer to read than i expected, and that's because the prose is woven together with the dense intricacy of a forest of roots (haha, get it, because. okay.). a marsh's watery surface is a "great mirror etched with birds;" WW1 reserve forts are "nerve clusters from which communication ditches spidered out toward the front lines." every couple pages there was a line that would clock me directly in the head, like [Rand] knew the war only by its absences: horses, white bread, men over fifteen. this is a book that should be read slowly, because each page should be savored.

- sometimes, um, maybe too slowly? i'm giving this four stars instead of five despite how badly the emotional narrative Got Me, just because sometimes there was almost too much about trees in here. the agricultural research necessary to write this must have been insane; nevertheless, there is a reason i don't read a lot of treatises about landscapes. i really like what pladek does with the plot (that is, particularly the fact that it doesn't follow the traditional three-act plot structure, deliberately, because it is writing against the Big Grand Heroic Ending), but sometimes it wanders into repetition and made me wonder if this couldn't have been fifty pages shorter.

- that said, in many ways i am the target audience for "gay wisconsin book about martyrdom and wanting to kill yourself really bad but like in a glorious way" and the character work here is so fucking excellent. i read a review or two that was like, "rand just has the same realizations over and over," and, like, well yes, but that's because he's deranged. rand is so so so so awesome if you love protagonists who seem chill and cool and are actually unhinged. every fifty pages this guy is like, "wait, i've got it. i understand what i've been doing wrong," and he comes right up onto the very cliff's edge of the realization that perhaps martyrdom is not inherently good and one person cannot save the entire world in a grand white-saviory superhero moment, and then he jerks the steering wheel and swerves into something even fucking crazier than whatever he was doing beforehand. he does this like three times. swing and a fucking miss. it's incredible. the narration will say things like, "to calm down, rand decided to run through all the worst possible scenarios in his head over and over again and making them progressively worse each time." this is a paraphrase of at least two different lines where he's doing psychological torture on himself for no fucking reason. he has every disease in the world.

- specifically, rand is so compelling despite all his problems because... well, the self-sacrificial narrative is also compelling! i kept finding myself frustratedly thinking, "well, but why does he even have the magic powers if they don't work long-term?!" and then i was like... ah. i'm rand. i'm doing the rand thing: assuming there must be a meaningful teleological narrative for a person's life; assuming you can be the Chosen One (bonus points if you get to be tragic and miserable but in an admirable way). of course, this is a novel, and pladek chose to give his main character plant powers, but within the world of the text, there is absolutely no special god-given reason rand has been given this ability. and on a doyleist level, the god-given reason is... to tell a story that sharply contradicts said meaningful teleological death narrative. rand is wedded to that narrative for most of this book, and it makes him genuinely, deeply self-centered, in a way that would horrify him to confront--self-centered because he wants so badly to be selfless. you simply cannot maintain that level of self-loathing and focus on sacrifice without becoming negatively obsessed with yourself, convinced the world revolves around you and that your failures will doom everybody around you.

- on which note, and re: plot structure, i find it very effective that the "climactic" scene comes about 70% of the way through, at the clearwater marsh scene, instead of at the very end, and then there's a LONG cooldown of rand realizing that sometimes life does not actually move in grand tragic heroic narratives and is just sometimes mundane and hard. there is literally no perfect promised end! you just experience things and then have to keep going! the end of this book is not a huge heroic win OR a huge heroic failure--when i got to the climax, i was like, "oh, shit, already? what the hell is gonna happen for the rest of this book?" because i was very much expecting a Big Grand Ending where rand either won (i doubted it) or fucked up and died. but no. the book winds down with rand on an isolated farm, relearning his way around his own body and the natural world and his best friend and the simple quiet facts of being alive. i can understand why this plot/pacing detail might frustrate people, but i think it's a truer and more fitting ending for this story and these themes than a more commercial action-movie-type finale. and it resonated with me especially, because some of it isn't just about wanting to be a glorious martyr; some of it is about wanting to exist in the world without causing harm. the desire to disappear, "touching nothing, hurting nothing, just opening his notebooks to record the land conversing with the season," without continuing to leave brutal marks of war and colonialism and control and destruction on the land. if only rand could leave no trace on other people's lives--but that's impossible! a person can't die without leaving ripples! a person can't just stop talking to his boyfriend and thus escape hurting him! the leaving, the death, the absence, is also a harm! there is no way to exist in this world without hurting things and people sometimes, and if you have the same OCD that i do, that's a fact that can drive you fucking crazy. it's a fact you need to learn to grow around nevertheless.

- speaking of people in rand's life: i love gabriel dearly and i think the various ways he and rand intersect with masculinity (rand as a white man distant from queer community, whose fears of being too "soft" aren't even consciously connected to gender in his head; gabriel as a mexican man embedded in gay sociality who is forced to constantly posture and prove himself) could fill a thesis. but jonna is the real love of my life and the shining star of the supporting cast for me. she's such a fabulous parallel to rand, because she has so many of the same problems but also enough different problems that she can kind of puncture his bullshit! while also participating in her own bullshit! there is no Very Competent Lesbian rolling her eyes at the disaster gay men here--or, rather, there is a lesbian rolling her eyes at the gay men, but she's also then turning around and failing at relationships and fucking up her own life in beautiful complimentary ways. she's a wreck and it's awesome and i need her so bad

- it's so awesome how rand does not literally have an ED (i mean, he doesn't eat enough, to the point where other characters comment on it, but it's WW1 and subclinical or whatever) but also he does. like. yeah he does. sooooo much of this book is about deprivation and it's interesting that his gift is also depriving the land around him of nutrients/life, while he does the same to his own body. also, i just love to see a bitch with food issues in a text that isn't about that. you and me both in the restrictive martyrdom trenches babyboy [blowing him a kiss]

not sure how much sense this review makes, as it is sort of a jumbled list of thoughts that i have, most of which i already subjected dr. pladek to, because i am a pest. (try this review for coherence.) nevertheless: this is a really really good book and you should read it, and i promise i'm not just saying that because i'm friends with the author or because nobody ever writes about wisconsin. (but seriously, nobody ever writes about wisconsin!)

you should read this if you enjoy:
- beautiful lush prose!
- character-driven fiction with slow/loose plots!
- historical fiction that is gay without overly-modernizing the gay experience but also while keeping it grounded in the queer communities that existed at the time!
- speculative fiction riding the border between fantasy and litfic!
- men who can't handle emotional intimacy so they just jerk off miserably while ghosting their boyfriends and plotting their own beautiful redeeming suicides!
- stories about war that don't romanticize war!
- stories about martyrdom and self-sacrifice that actually tangle with how appealing those things are without endorsing either!
- aldo leopold!
- bisexual men and lesbians being friends!
- characters with psychological situations so bad the dsm hasn't invented the words for them yet!
and, of course:
- plants!

[Julie Capell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a puzzler for me. Clearly, it is a love letter but a very unconventional one. . . and I don't mean in the sense that it is a queer romance. That relationship is very beautifully and sensitively portrayed, but the protagonist saves most of his passion for nature. On page after page, the reader is treated to precise, loving descriptions of the natural world, as here:

...he took pleasure in the weedy, stubbled woods, learning their contours as if studying the slope of a lover's chin. . . . he sat to knead the duff and smell its wet,fragrant quilt of leaves. Sometimes he rolled over to watch the brush lace the light, in patterns as minutely alive as the contractions of an iris.

To break up the scenes dedicated to wandering about in nature, conflict is introduced via a couple of angles. The gay romance is thwarted by WWI-era attitudes that not only disapprove of, but actively prosecute anyone foolish enough to be open about their non-conventional leanings. And the protagonist's "magical" ability to grow seemingly any plant just by touching the soil and thinking plant-y thoughts is negated by the unintended consequence that everything he grows, along with the soil he grows it in, dies within hours or days.

It's an interesting set-up, but for me, the story took too long to go anywhere. We understand the considerable challenges facing the main character quite early on, and then . . . he just keeps making the same mistakes and facing the same problems over and over and over. Just like his magic plants, there was no real growth happening. I found myself actively disliking the protagonist, who seemed to prefer the drama of sacrificing his own happiness when it wasn't necessary, even better if no one knew he was making a sacrifice.

In the afterword, the author says this novel began life as a short story. I thought many times as I was reading that it would have been much better as a short story. As a novel, I'm not sure what it was trying to be. The fact that the protagonist's magic didn't work made it unlike other works of magical realism, while also making it unlike any fantasy I've ever read. In fantasy, it's not unusual for magic systems to have a downside, but generally, the protagonist figures out how to balance the positive and negative aspects of their talent so that they are able to make a positive contribution to society. I read through to the end because I hoped things would eventually start looking up. Not to spoil the ending for you, but if you're feeling the same once you get halfway through, you might want to move on to your next read.

For a book that's more of a page-turner about man v nature with magical-realistic elements (along with scifi) I would suggest Appleseed by Matt Bell.

[Darcy Bonds · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this book! As a horticulturist and landscape designer by trade and a lifelong lover of nature and fantasy, this gave me exactly what I needed. One of the most beautiful and personal books I’ve ever read. This story about a forester blessed (or cursed?) with the power to make things grow amidst the turmoil of WWI contained beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a wonderfully tragic love story, and an amazing account of what it is to define your identity amongst chaos.

[Elizabeth Trites · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pladek’s writing was artfully detailed, especially his beautiful descriptions of nature. I didn’t mind the slow pacing - actually, I wish it had been longer, as the ending felt abrupt and left me wondering what happened to Rand and Gabriel. I also wish there had been an author’s note to make even more sense of the history and biology behind the story and his writing process. Reading about times of war from the perspective of a naturalist/engineer/logger was also unique.

[Ben Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging portrait of a young man from WWI era Wisconsin with an unexpected gift. He struggles with loyalties and guilt while his gift starts to look more like a curse

[G.P. Gottlieb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A young Wisconsin forester with a gift for magically growing trees and plants is drafted, sent to France during WWI, and forced to grow wood for the American Army. Rand Brandt is living with two secrets, either of which could destroy him: 1) everything he grows will die within days, and 2) He’s gay. Dry Land lovingly describes woodlands. flowers, trees, and marshes, and delves deeply into relationships, queerness, and nature.

I was honored to interview the author about his stunning debut! https://newbooksnetwork.com/dry-land

[AC]

I have no idea how to review this one. I always find magical realism kind of hard to... I dunno, "accept?" "Believe?" "Get into?" But maybe that's the point. I dunno. The writing here is beautiful, and I thought it was a very unique -- scratch that, downright weird -- meditation on the ecology, ethics, and politics of genius. No genre conventions or popular expectations appear to have been pandered to in this one and I respect that, even if as a rather unimaginative reader it left me scratching my head.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

The writing was so gorgeous and the queer romance beautifully drawn, if secondary to the protagonist’s deep love for nature.

Speaking of the protagonist, he made this a frustrating book at times by making the same terrible decisions over and over again with the same result. The masochism became a bit annoying. And I did find I was started to skim as I got closer to the end. That said, I would still recommend it!

[Andy Janes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVED this book. Sad and queer with some great discussions of conservation! Highly recommend.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to just hang out forever in the farm scenes toward the end.

[Syr Hayati · Rating 5 out of 5]

B. Pladek's Dry Land is one of the books I keep within reach so I can come back to it over and over - it is one of the books I would bring on the spaceship, both because it has so much to say about our place in the world and in this moment, and what it means to love something enough to try to save it (even if you can't), and because, despite it's depth, it is so alive with joy and beauty of the world, that when nothing else is left, you could remake a marsh, an ecosystem, a whole dawn chorus from its pages. My words won't be enough, just read it.