Rose Aiken is white. Rosy Howard is black. Each has been raised by a single mother. Rose’s mother, Gertrude, withheld affection in order to teach Rose self-reliance. Rosy’s mother, Cilla, gave Rosy an abundance of love, but suffers from a manic-depression that forced Rosy to take on adult responsibilities when quite young.

The novel begins after Gertrude has lost control of her car, hitting Rosy and killing them both. Rose, orphaned and alone, sets out to locate Rosy’s family and tell them of her fate. The book then alternates between chapters following Rose’s quest and those revealing the events that brought Rosy to the place where she died. Those events include the flooding of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, the chaos of the Superdome (an inadequate evacuation center), and Rosy’s trek amongst the mass of humanity trying to walk out of New Orleans to Gretna, Louisiana.

Urbani has an ear for dialogue and, where she presents scenes, they ably flow from whimsical absurdity to the moving to the terrifying. For example, while Rosy, Cilla, and their neighbor, Maya, are marooned on a rooftop, a man drifts toward them through the flood waters:

“‘G’morning,’ Maya called out softly…
He smiled and called back, ‘G’morning, ladies. How y’all doing?’
‘Been better,’ Maya replied. ‘Been worse.’
‘Now ain’t that the truth!’
‘Reckon you’d like to join us?’ Maya asked.
‘I’d be much obliged,’ he replied. Just like that: a normal exchange. As if he’d been invited to set a spell on the stoop and share a pitcher of lemonade. As if he weren’t holding with one hand onto the garish red handle of the plastic cooler he straddled, the other arm waving wildly in the air as he strove to keep his balance. The softly swaying current carried him ever closer.
‘Name’s Willie,’ he said, bobbing toward them, thirty or so feet away.
‘Pleasure to meet you, Willie,’ Maya replied…‘Welcome to my home.’”

This quaint exchange belies their precarious situation — none of them can swim. Within two pages, the scene turns deadly, and Urbani carries this shift off wonderfully. Likewise, her more panoramic scenes of the Superdome chaos and the bridge to Gretna are well drawn.

Unfortunately, she frequently dilutes the power of her scenes by interrupting their most dramatic moments with long reflections on backstory. Furthermore, the backstories are formulaic (the broken homes, Gertrude’s post-partum depression, Cilla’s manic depression, etc. — a reveal at the end of Landfall even provides a contrived Dickensian twist).

Rosy’s story, in particular, is disturbing because it promotes a racial stereotype: that of the fatherless poor black girl who becomes promiscuous to gain an illusory sense of security. Urbani writes: “Fourteen boys in twenty-four months to indulge her lust for those fleeting moments of safety in the embrace of someone stronger than she.”

Rosy is saved by an Oprah episode “that spoke directly to her, wouldn’t let her hide: guests bemoaning the plague of promiscuity among fatherless girls…[Rosy] saw her own image reflected in the glass…Then Oprah leaned right toward Rosy, as if reaching out to grasp her hand, and spoke the words that truly motivated the change, insisting she must love herself and let that love be enough.”

The presentation of Katrina’s larger historical context also leaves much to be desired. In an author’s note, Urbani acknowledges that initial reports of wholesale violence, looting, and civil unrest were inaccurate. She states, “I portrayed Landfall’s characters reacting in the moment to those initial rumors and reports; inclusion of such responses in the book is not meant to imply that the acts of violence were eventually proven true.”

Despite this disclaimer, the novel does treat the initial reports and rumors as fact, even quoting FEMA Director Michael Brown’s claim that “[We are working] under conditions of urban warfare,” while ignoring the federal government’s unconscionable delay in acting.

At the same time, the novel refers to the victims deserted by officialdom as “rogues” and “hordes.” After sympathetically describing a physician’s exhausted efforts at the Superdome, Urbani writes of evacuees who express their frustration: “The docs and the guards and the good-deed-doers turned a deaf ear for the most part and the rogues soon enough raged themselves hoarse and irrelevant.”

And again, “By the time the Superdome was emptied…more than four thousand tons of trash and human debris would be hauled away on the backs of the guardsmen left behind. It would take an additional thirteen months and $193 million to fully repair and refurbish the structure picked to pieces by the hordes.”

These characterizations come from the authorial narrator, not from a character. (It should be noted that Urbani formerly worked on disaster relief matters for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Possibly, this resulted in an unconscious bias toward the official perspective.)

Finally, Urbani repeatedly refers to the evacuees as “refugees,” suggesting either ignorance or insensitivity to the connotative difference between the terms. These were citizens evacuated from a disaster area, not people fleeing to a foreign country. The media’s use of the term “refugee” was a matter of great contention during Katrina’s aftermath, and an author purporting to address that larger Katrina story should be aware of that controversy (see, e.g., Austin Weekly News and NBC News).

Urbani, a former grief counselor, probably approached this story with good intentions but, ultimately, those intentions fall short of their mark.

Jessie Seigel is an associate editor at the Potomac Review. Her fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Ontario Review, Gargoyle, and the anthology Electric Grace. She also writes on writing at the Adventurous Writer.