4 Books to Read Over a Winter Weekend
Cozy up to
the fire and celebrate your day off with the kind of "earthy, reverent,
poetic and wry" fiction that makes you feel "what it is to be fully
alive in the world."
By Dawn Raffel
1 of 4
Heart Spring Mountain
By Robin MacArthur
368 pages;
Ecco
When a
young woman named Vale receives the call that her estranged, drug-addicted
mother, Bonnie, is missing in the aftermath of a tropical storm, she returns
home to rural Vermont. Hitching a ride from the bus stop in a pickup truck,
Vale's past flashes before her as she passes "the fire-station,
rain-wrecked cornfields where Vale used to lie down between the tall stalks and
get stoned, the 7-Eleven where she's stolen cigarettes, candy, bottles of wine.
... Every piece of landscape contains a memory; they attack her chest,
claw there." The search for her mother is both literal and emotional as
Vale reconnects with long-lost family members, including her ex-hippie aunt Deb
and her great-aunt Hazel. As the narrative flows between characters and back in
time, family secrets, betrayals and tragedies seep out. Hazel's late-life
confusion underscores the blurring of time and memory, the way our ancestors'
stories and the land itself help shape our own lives. "How easy to pass
along our flaws—our anger, sorrow, reserve, withholding," Deb
says. A novel of compassion for ourselves and for those who came before
us.
— Dawn Raffel
Published 01/03/2018