Saturday, July 6, 2019

Some reviews of The Ash Family!




Dear friends,

My book has gotten some reviews, which is really wonderful and exciting. Here are links to all the ones I could find:


The New Yorker Briefly Noted // The New York Times // Paris Review Staff Picks // Minneapolis Star-Tribune // Associated Press // Chicago Review of Books // New York Journal of Books // Fredericksburg Free Lance Star // Book Reporter // Arts Fuse // Barrelhouse // Booklist // Kirkus // Publishers Weekly


Here are some quotations:

“[A] stunning début...Dektar has a gift for describing the wonders of the natural world, and sensitively inhabits a young cultist’s fragile state.” —The New Yorker

“In the recent surge of fiction written by millennial women for their peers, none have done quite what Molly Dektar does in her debut novel, The Ash Family…The ‘millennial novel,’ as it has developed into a subgenre thus far, is in large part about individuation and actualization, but here it is about trying to connect in some meaningful way with the physical world. The protagonist, Berie, is never fully involved in her new family’s increasingly violent acts, and this is likely because Dektar’s attention is as captivated by the natural world as Berie’s is; she would rather linger over landscapes than plot a protest. And thankfully so—Dektar crafts beautiful prose, lush and loamy in the vein of Thomas Hardy’s naturalism.” —The Paris Review

“This debut novel is nothing short of compelling . . . a captivating and haunting tale.” —New York Journal of Books


"If Wild Wild Country was your number one Netflix show of 2018, then you'll love the story of Berie—a 19-year-old who finds belonging in an off-the-grid (and dangerous) collective instead of her freshman dorm.” —Glamour


“Although it’s tempting to rush through this near-thriller, The Ash Family is the kind of novel that should be read slowly. Yes, it’s propulsive and ridden with moments of tension, but savoring on the layered secrets found inside the unraveling Ash Family’s farm is the real treat here.”—Chicago Review of Books


“Molly Dektar's creepy, brilliant debut novel, The Ash Family has not a whiff of the supernatural about it. Yet it is a top-notch horror story, made even more unsettling by the fact that nothing about what it unravels is particularly far-fetched.”—Fredericksburg Free Lance Star


You can find more info about the book on my site, and order it here.

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

A few book updates

I have a new website for book-related news. See it here.

I also set up a TinyLetter. You can subscribe here.


I'll be doing some readings for the Ash Family in April:

4/8/19, Manhattan, New York: Barnes & Noble, Upper West Side

4/10/19, Brooklyn, New York: McNally Jackson Williamsburg, with Dinaw Mengestu

4/16/19, Durham, North Carolina: Regulator Book Shop

4/22/19, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Porter Square Books

5/6/19, Manhattan, New York: NYPL Young Lions


I hope to see you there!



Grand Pyrenees dogs that made it into the book.

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Pre-Order The Ash Family


My first novel, which I've been working on for nearly as long as I've had this blog, will come out on April 9th, 2019. Many experiences I've posted about here have ended up in the book, which is about an off-the-grid homestead in the mountains of North Carolina. 

(The tagline is: "When a young woman leaves her family—and the civilized world—to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost.")

You can order it on Amazon here or IndieBound here.

Also I just joined Goodreads, you can follow me here.

Though the social media I update most often is my Instagram.

As we turn the corner into 2019, I am feeling very grateful to all of you who have read my blog and reached out to me over the years. Thank you, thank you, thank you. <3 

Wednesday, August 1, 2018