'Kin' review: Feeling lost in a wilderness world

Reading Shawna Kay Rodenberg's "Kin" is like "Twin Peaks," "Blue Velvet" or any of the twisted works by director David Lynch. However, "Kin" is not someone's too-surreal-to-be-believed nightmares written for the screen, but someone's living nightmare detailed in a memoir.

The horror of Rodenberg's life begins within The Body, "an end-times wilderness community, cloistered in the woods of northern Minnesota," which her father joined when "he was red-eyed and mad with fear, following his tour of duty in Vietnam."

Her family leaves behind a life in Kentucky, with its accompanying possessions and people, for a spare existence near Grand Marais, where Bible study and traditional roles are upheld. Mostly Rodenberg tries to evade her father's wrath, which she blames on herself, as children do, because she "found being good impossible."

Misery in myriad forms dogs her, and refuge is difficult to come by, but Rodenberg finds it in art, music and books, particularly the work of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Despite the prohibition against possessions, she is given a set of the "Little House" books as a birthday present and reads them over and over again, eventually realizing that Wilder was "unlucky in life until she began writing her own story."

But Rodenberg doesn't keep to her own story. She intersperses third-person accounts of her mother's life in Kentucky and her father's before he went to Vietnam, including pages — perhaps too many — of letters he wrote to his parents while he was stationed there.

Ultimately, though, the alternating chapters provide context and feed Rodenberg's overarching theme about how stories repeat in families, that lineage "wasn't about the past, like people often thought, so much as the future, and no matter how a person might try to trick destiny, most people ended up as carbon copies of their parents and even ancestors they never knew."

Rodenberg strives for a tidy ending for herself, but obstacles keep popping up. And why shouldn't they? Life isn't neat, and she leans into that, digging deep with dense but readable prose and providing compelling insights. Besides, her life doesn't end with the memoir's last page. There's always more to be said. Here's hoping she will.