Rubio taps into a world most have forgotten   “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children,” says the main character at one point in “The Woodsman’s Daughter.” That paraphrase from the Book of Exodus sounds the theme of Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s new novel. Rubio first gained national attention with her debut novel, “Icy Sparks,” the story of a young Kentucky girl. It was an Oprah Book Club pick and a best seller. Rubio has chosen a different setting for her second novel, south Georgia in the late 19th – and early-20th centuries. At the center of Rubio’s tale is Dalia Miller, the privileged daughter of a self-made man who acquired his weath processing turpentine. Dalia’s father is often gone, working in the turpentine camps, which leaves her to fend for her ineffectual, laudanum-addicted mother and her younger, blind sister. When the father does come home, his clumsy and alcoholic-laced attempts to show his love for his family upset what little balance there is. But this is just a symptom. There is a secret at the heart of these people, and eventually the fragile family cannot bear its weight. Tragedies ensue, causing Dalia to leave the piney woods and settle in Samson, a small town. The remaining two-thirds of the novel is concerned with Dalia’s very different new existence and her attempts to flee from the past and fashion the life she wants for herself. Arriving with not much education and even less money, she chooses the women’s traditional route to security: marrying well. Achieving that, she in time has two quite different children: a son she finds difficult to love and, in contrast, a daughter on whom she mounds obsessive love and attention. Dalia must pay a price for both relationships. This is the microcosm in which the pain of her past gets played out – and the emphasis is on “micro.” Once Rubio gets her heroine to Samson, the world shrinks, and the story becomes a stage where the spotlight is focused on Dalia’s actions and conversation. Not enough interior monologue is provided to fill the reader in on whatever inward journey gets her to the redemption that’s found at the story’s end. Also, there’s little observation about the wider place and time Dalia lives in. But the book is filled with richly detailed descriptions of food, readers would have been better served (no pun intended) if Rubio had given the characters as much attention. An exception is Katie Mae, the book’s most sympathetic character. She is an African American women who was a servant to the Miller family and who eventually joins Dalia in Samson. Dalia is a strong-willed women, but not truly strong, and Katie Mae is the wise woman whom Dalia draws strength from and uses as her moral compass. At one point Monroe Miller, Dalia’s father, says that he can’t stay away from Millertown, his turpentine camp: "It’s my real home. The other one’s too fancy for me.” He is more at home in his woods than in the fine home he has bought for his wife and children. In much the same way, Rubio is on her surest ground when she writes about close-to-the-earth people such as Katie Mae and the turpentine workers. Like the coal-mining towns in Appalachia and the mill villages of the Carolinas, the turpentine camps of South Georgia were stratified communities defined by one commodity, and the book brings to life a culture that many will not have known even existed: “In every direction, Monroe saw longleaf pines. Miles upon miles, acres upon acres of the gray-limbed trees. Straight and erect like soldiers on a battlefield, like Confederate soldiers, standing tall and proud. ‘And undefeated,’ he said aloud, breathing in, drawing the acrid smell of pine gum deep into his lungs. He stared at the white notches cut near the ground, gaping wounds in the trunks of the trees. He marveled at the white streaks, flaring upward a head high marring the bark like abscesses oozing. His eyes traveled over the scaly branches, their clusters of pine needles spiking upward. The sap stung his nose, and he pinched his nostrils hard, delighting in the strong odor. Over ten thousand acres, he thought. ‘All of it mine.’ ” In this first section of the book, big themes are introduced: the secret that haunts the Miller family, the stunted family structure, Monroe’s alcoholism, a deliberate act of violence. Though their later effects are hinted at, they are not given as thorough a treatment as the beginning suggests they will be. We see Dalia become the women she is at the book’s end and are left wanting to know more of the why. Despite a promising beginning, “The Woodsman’s Daughter” gets lost along the way. Reviewed by Cathy High for the News-Record, Greensboro, North Carolina