Show me good land
(Books)

Show Me Good Land is the debut novel for author Shonna Milliken Humphrey. Likened to work by Carolyn Chute and Cathie Pelletier, Show Me Good Land details four lives, each connected to a rural northern Maine community by the same gruesome murder. Odie Hollander solves the murder while spending time in jail on a domestic violence assault charge. Miles Compton, gay, is a listed sex offender after having a relationship with an underage student. Emmett Pratt manages the local gas station and is accused of killing his aunt. Rhetta Ballou is driving home after leaving town as the teenaged mistress of her high school teacher almost two decades ago. Show Me Good Land looks hard at constructed social norms, especially those in the confines of an isolated, poor, rural area. Is violence ever justified? Abortion? Underage sex? Underage gay sex? No character is fully good or fully bad, and the pleasure of this book's reading lies in discovering where individual moral lines are drawn.