Butter Road - by Jaclyn Gilbert (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence.

In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an "English" outsider and wife of a doctor researching genetic disorders in the Amish population.

At the novel's outset, Sara enlists young Emma for housework and gardening to help the Walshes alleviate the debt they've accumulated caring for Emma's disabled brother, who has the rare condition Sara's husband is studying. Over the course of several months, Sara and Emma form a bond, and as Emma explores Sara's library, she begins writing fragments of memory on the backs of old feed calendars--a process that leads her to grapple with the devastating deaths of her sister and friends, and the insularity of Amish forgiveness. The more Emma writes, the more she questions her upbringing and ingrained beliefs, ultimately seeing her relationship to Isaac Ames, the man she is destined to marry, in a new light. The story culminates with the characters making breathtaking, self-searching decisions that alter the lives of others as well as their own.

Emotionally acute and lyrically spare, Butter Road centers on living with what we can't control, on understanding trauma and collective grief, and on following one's heart.

Review Quotes

"In Jaclyn Gilbert's luminous novel Butter Road, three women in an Amish community are haunted by grief. . . . . The persistence of grief and the aftereffects of trauma also permeate the pages. Emma, for example, has visible scars from 'the Happening, ' but she is not allowed to mention it. She also shows evidence of PTSD, while her mother believes that it is 'better to be sad than to question God.' Butter Road is a profound novel in which women grapple with their tragic pasts and moral dilemmas."

"Butter Road is a thoughtful, nuanced exploration of shame, trauma, and the interlinked questions of what we owe the other members of our communities and what we owe ourselves. In lovely, sometimes lush language, Jaclyn Gilbert takes a close look at women seeking self-determination against very strong odds."

"A gripping, superb novel by a masterful storyteller. This belongs in the canon of contemporary American realism about small communities riven by tragedy, alongside The Sweet Hereafter and The House of Sand and Fog."

"An infinitely empathetic and tender study of both grief and community care, Butter Road is elegiac in its lyricism, thoughtful in its investigation of the histories we tend to, and profoundly optimistic in its belief in human kindness as a leveling response to inhuman cruelty. It's a book that takes on so much: female rage, grief, and power. Mother and daughterhood. Individual and collective loss. Forgiveness and belief. But at its core, it's also a book about what it means to keep going. 'You show me the world in pieces, and also how the pieces fit together the longer we look. The longer we let ourselves see, ' Gilbert writes. Butter Road is a testament to that power of seeing wholeness in fracture, witness in absence, and surrender in survival. A powerful read."

About the Author

Jaclyn Gilbert grew up running in the Amish countryside of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the novel Late Air, and her short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Post Road, Tin House, Literary Hub, Long Reads, and elsewhere. She has held fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY. In 2021, she founded Driftless Literary, a boutique literary agency committed to representing genre-defying literature in the US and abroad.