Priya Deshpande is a Seattle‑based librarian and literary critic whose essays focus on intergenerational narratives and place‑based storytelling.
Review — “Stone Orchard” by Jonah Hale
In Stone Orchard, Jonah Hale crafts a quiet, tensile novel about a family farm at the edge of foreclosure and the grief that settles into soil. The book follows Mara, a horticulturist who returns home after her mother’s death to renegotiate the future of the orchard with her stubborn, aging father. Hale’s sentences move with patient precision—botanical detail that never feels ornamental, and dialogue that leaves room for breath. What impresses most is the novel’s refusal to romanticize resilience; seasons pass, and with them, the slow recognition that love sometimes means pruning what you cannot save.
A subplot involving a neighboring beekeeper provides a luminous counterpoint—small scenes humming with metaphor that never tip into excess. If the final chapter resolves a shade too neatly, the emotional ledger still balances, earned by the novel’s careful attention to labor, weather, and the rituals that anchor a place to the people who tend it. Stone Orchard is ultimately about inheritance: not just land, but the habits of care we pass on, and the courage it takes to revise them. Readers who admire Marilynne Robinson’s restraint or Anne Tyler’s domestic acuity will find much to savor here.