Published ten years after The Story of a Country Boy (1934), this was the last of Powell’s six Ohio novels, and it must have come as something of a shock to her admirers for, in the interim, she had attained a modest but enthusiastic following as a comic novelist with Turn, Magic Wheel (1936), The Happy Island (1938), Angels on Toast (1940), and A Time To Be Born (1942). Such rural books as The Bride’s House (1929) and Dance Night (1930) were long out of print, not to reappear for more than half a century. By 1941, when Powell set to work on My Home Is Far Away, she was better known for the smart, boozy, bawdy, hilarious send-ups of Manhattan high and low life she had discovered since becoming what she called a “permanent visitor” to the city. She had begun to attain a reputation for high sophistication (“Miss Powell is one of the wittiest women around and our best answer to the familiar question, ‘Who really says the funny things for which Dorothy Parker gets credit?’ ” Diana Trilling wrote in 1942) and nothing could be less “sophisticated”—in the glittering, all-knowing, furiously present-tense, big-city manner Powell had perfected—than My Home Is Far Away.

This was the month of cherries and peaches, of green apples beyond the grape arbor, of little dandelion ghosts in the grass, of sour grass and four-leaf clovers, of still dry heat holding the smell of nasturtiums and dying lilacs. This was the best month of all and the best day. It was not birthday, Easter, Christmas, or picnic, but all these things and something else, something wonderful, something utterly unknown. The two little girls in embroidered white Sunday dresses knew no way to express their secret joy but by whirling each other dizzily over the lawn crying, “We’re moving, we’re moving! We’re moving to London Junction!”

Powell started My Home Is Far Away in the early morning of January 27, 1941, while suffering from a fever that brought back so many childhood memories that such a novel seemed “imperative.” “At the beginning, it is written as for a child—words, images, etc., are on the table level of their eyes,” Powell noted in her diary. “Everyone is good to the three sisters, their pleasures are simple, their parents good. As they grow, the manner of writing changes—the knowledge of cruelty, divorce, disillusionment, betrayal …” In fact, My Home Is Far Away is one of the very few examples of a book written for adults, with an adult command of the language, that maintains the vantage point of a hungry, serious child throughout. It might be likened to a memoir that has been penned not with the usual tranquility of distance but rather with the sense that everything happening to the characters is happening right now, without any promise of eventual escape, without any assurance that childhood, too, shall pass away.

I have found that reactions to My Home Is Far Away—and, indeed, to most of Powell’s Ohio novels—vary enormously. Well aware that I am generalizing, I should say that the strongest responses to this book usually come from women readers; from readers—male and female—who know (and feel) the landscapes of the American Midwest; and—especially—from readers who have survived frustrating childhoods, in part by creating for themselves imaginary lives just over the horizon. (Is there another book that so vividly conveys that sense, common among gifted children, that they are human arrows, pulled back for years and years, then finally let fly to find their targets?) This is not to limit or disparage “My Home Is Far Away” but merely to point out that it is not a “typical” Powell novel by any means and that readers who have picked this up looking for riotous wit may be disappointed.