Saturday Review: “Before Helene,” a review by Eric Walker of Wayne Caldwell’s poetry collection River Road, and novel Shadow Family in NCLR Online Winter 2026
It’s important to pay attention when the muse descends. Walker immediately finds the throughline of not only these two publications, but Caldwell’s work in general: “Caldwell is a master of mountain voices.” Walker explains, “Posey Green is exhibit A, in Woodsmoke…. In River Road, Susan McFalls commands center stage. She is less homespun than Posey Green, which we learn in scattered bits of personal history.”
Walker then writes about Caldwell’s novel, Shadow Family, a non-memoir but vaguely auto-biographical adoption tale, told from the point of view (mostly) of the two mothers. “With good historical reasons, current orthodoxy in adoption studies maintains that the voice of the adoptee trumps all other voices in the adoption constellation,” Walker writes. “But this novel instead gives powerful voice to a birth mother and an adoptive mother before winding up with Will, whose autobiographical voice ghosts the adoption memoir that Caldwell, an adoptee, chose not to write. For the bulk of the book, those two women testify to the power of fiction to cast a different kind of imaginative spell than memoir.”
While Hurricane Helene certainly showers the work and the review, it’s the voices of the characters that shine through and leave the reader desiring to read the new works.
Read the rest of the review online and grab both books on Bookshop.org or you local independent bookstore.
