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Deborah Donovan

FictionPopular Fiction

A mother’s search for justice

Review by Deborah Donovan

In English author Yvvette Edwards’ second novel, following her acclaimed debut, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2012), she delves into the timely issue of violence against and between young black men—both its possible causes, and its heartrending effects on the families involved.

The Mother opens in London, as Marcia Williams prepares to attend the first day of the trial of the young man accused of stabbing to death her bright and loving 16-year-old son, Ryan. We learn that Ryan was returning to the Sports Ground to retrieve his football shoes after practice; that a jogger saw a young man run toward Ryan and stab him four times; and that the accused, Tyson Manley, claims to have been with his girlfriend at the time of the murder.

Edwards leads the reader through the jury selection, the opening statements and the evidence presented by both the prosecution and defense in complete detail. But in the process of laying out these basic facts, Edwards perceptively explores a wide realm of issues, uncovering layer by layer the complicated answers to the questions that have hounded Marcia since her son’s death. How could someone so young kill another person so brutally? Why does Tyson show no remorse? Why would his girlfriend lie for someone who has shown no respect for her?

Edwards writes with compassion for her characters and with intuitive understanding of the effects of loss on a family, as well as the underlying causes that can lead to senseless crimes such as this one. The Mother is highly recommended for readers who enjoy current issue-related fiction by authors such as Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In English author Yvvette Edwards’ second novel, following her acclaimed debut, A Cupboard Full of Coats (2012), she delves into the timely issue of violence against and between young black men—both its possible causes, and its heartrending effects on the families involved.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Struggling for freedom

Review by Deborah Donovan

Kathleen Grissom’s eagerly anticipated sequel to The Kitchen House (2010), which portrayed the grim reality of life on a Virginia plantation, follows some of that novel’s characters to pre-Civil War Philadelphia. But it stands alone as its own compelling story as well.

Jamie Pyke, son of a slave and the master of Tall Oakes plantation, escaped at age 13 to Philadelphia. Jamie easily passed for white, and he has become a well-established society gentleman over the last decade. But when Henry, the slave who helped Jamie get to Philadelphia years earlier, asks him for a life-changing favor, Jamie must confront his past.

Glory Over Everything features an engaging cast of characters. These include Henry and his son, Pan, who reminds Jamie of himself as a child; Robert, a longtime butler who has his own dark history; Sukey, a slave from Tall Oakes who is now part of the Underground Railroad; Caroline, Jamie’s love interest; and Caroline’s parents, a bigoted couple who threaten to reveal Jamie’s multiracial heritage. Chapters are written in the voices of these characters, delving into the interwoven stories. 

Grissom brings the 1830s to life, a time when slavery was still thriving, freed slaves lived in fear of recapture and abolitionists were becoming increasingly active. Like The Kitchen House, Glory Over Everything will appeal to readers who appreciate a thought-provoking historical drama, making it a good selection for book clubs as well.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kathleen Grissom’s eagerly anticipated sequel to The Kitchen House (2010), which portrayed the grim reality of life on a Virginia plantation, follows some of that novel’s characters to pre-Civil War Philadelphia. But it stands alone as its own compelling story as well.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A poignant, thoughtful exploration of the experience of war

Review by Deborah Donovan

The terrible waste of war—especially its unrelenting effect on those who somehow survive—lies at the center of Sebastian Faulks’ 13th novel. Where My Heart Used to Beat is a return to historical fiction, the genre Faulks is best known for thanks to bestsellers like Birdsong.

London psychiatrist Robert Hendricks, now in his 60s, has tried to bury the memories of his service in World War II, but the losses he experienced still haunt him. Isolated and lonely, Robert is intrigued when he receives a letter from 93-year-old Alexander Pereira, a neurologist and World War I vet who claims to have served in the same infantry unit as the father Robert barely knew. Curious, Robert decides to accept Dr. Pereira’s offer to visit him at his home on a remote island off the southern coast of France.

Over the next several months, Robert makes a series of visits to Pereira, immersing himself in the revelations about his father and his own cloudy wartime memories. Pereira gradually gets Robert to open up about his war experiences—things he had not shared with anyone except the woman he loved and lost. Throughout the course of these introspective episodes, Robert and Pereira debate an array of philosophical issues, including whether 20th-century “ills” like the Holocaust and apartheid were the fault of individuals or governments. Robert gradually concludes that his postwar work as a psychiatrist has been “little more than an attempt at rebuttal.”

Faulks delves into the subjects of memory and loss with erudition and perception, engaging his readers in the task of grappling with their own memories of the past, and how those memories interject themselves into the present. His latest is a thoughtful and moving novel, beautifully told, about how humans can comprehend—or fail to comprehend—the atrocities that surround us every day. 

 

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The terrible waste of war—especially its unrelenting effect on those who somehow survive—lies at the center of Sebastian Faulks’ 13th novel. Where My Heart Used to Beat is a return to historical fiction, the genre Faulks is best known for thanks to bestsellers like Birdsong.
FictionPopular Fiction

Searching for home in Hong Kong

Review by Deborah Donovan

Three American women become ensconced in the cultural mélange of Hong Kong’s expat community in Janice Y.K. Lee’s absorbing, character-driven novel, following 2009’s The Piano Teacher. The author, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, opens her novel with a spot-on description of that sprawling city’s expat contingent—the Chinese, Irish, French, Koreans and Americans—“a veritable UN of fortune-seekers.” They have come for their jobs, or their husbands’ jobs; for six months, a year, maybe three years or more. And they have no idea what to expect from their temporary new home.

Mercy, 27, is a Korean-American woman who has been trying to make a “new start” in Hong Kong for three years. She was raised in a cramped apartment in Queens and graduated from Columbia, a “fancy college with fancy kids who showed her a different world.” She is having trouble finding a steady job and is not yet feeling comfortable in her role as one of the few single expats.

Margaret Reade also arrived three years ago, following her husband, a higher-up with a U.S. multinational. On the surface they are living the enviable, seemingly perfect expat life, but they have suffered a recent loss, and Margaret is finding it nearly impossible to move on. 

Hilary and her husband, David, have been in Hong Kong for eight years, and she has been trying to become pregnant ever since their arrival. Her marriage has “cooled into politeness,” but she’s hoping a child might help.

In Hong Kong’s insulated atmosphere, the paths of these three women manage to cross in intricate and unexpected ways. As they tell their stories in alternating chapters, Mercy, Margaret and Hilary become so familiar, the reader seems to have met them before. We know them not just superficially but are privy to their inner thoughts, frustrations and dreams. Like Jodi Picoult and Kristin Hannah, Lee is a perceptive observer of her compelling characters and brings them vividly to life in this moving novel.
 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Janice Y.K. Lee about The Expatriates.
 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Three American women become ensconced in the cultural mélange of Hong Kong’s expat community in Janice Y.K. Lee’s absorbing, character-driven novel, following 2009’s The Piano Teacher. The author, who was born and raised in Hong Kong, opens her novel with a spot-on description of that sprawling city’s expat contingent—the Chinese, Irish, French, Koreans and Americans—“a veritable UN of fortune-seekers.” They have come for their jobs, or their husbands’ jobs; for six months, a year, maybe three years or more. And they have no idea what to expect from their temporary new home.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Dispatches from the American northeast

Review by Deborah Donovan

Howard Frank Mosher’s bailiwick for more than 40 years, and the setting for many of his 12 previous books, both fiction and nonfiction, is Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom—called God’s Kingdom by its earliest settlers. This nickname serves as the title for Mosher’s latest novel, which follows the Kinneson family, whose roots in Vermont go back to Charles Kinneson I, who arrived from the Scottish Isle of Skye in the late 18th century. It’s mostly the story of Jim Kinneson, who turned 14 in 1952, and began to write down the family stories gradually passed down to him.

Some stories Jim has already heard, in bits and pieces; some he only learns from his grandfather over the next few years. The interwoven stories Mosher tells about this tightly knit, resilient family are funny and poignant, joyous and sad. The reader hears about Jim’s black friend Gaetan, who moved to the Kinneson farm from Montreal when the boys were both in high school. A “mathematical savant” who speaks little English, Gaetan is tormented by their bigoted Algebra teacher, with tragic results. We accompany Jim on his first and last hunt for deer. A great story about Ty Cobb catching the local team’s baseball while riding through town on the train—and mailing it back later—is followed by a moving tale of a union supporter at the American Furniture Co. who loses his hand in a ripsaw “accident.”

Each story Mosher tells is infused with the weather, rugged landscape and stoic characters for which he has become famous—and brings the reader closer to the beautiful yet hardscrabble world where people like the Kinnesons, escaped slaves fleeing north, French Canadians and Native Americans all fought to survive. Like Charles Dickens, whose novels Jim loves to read to his mute mother, Jim wants to converse with his readers—to write as if each was his best friend, to whom he could tell “absolutely anything.” This is how Mosher has written this novel, and his readers are rewarded with splendid storytelling.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Howard Frank Mosher’s bailiwick for more than 40 years, and the setting for many of his 12 previous books, both fiction and nonfiction, is Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom—called God’s Kingdom by its earliest settlers. This nickname serves as the title for Mosher’s latest novel, which follows the Kinneson family, whose roots in Vermont go back to Charles Kinneson I, who arrived from the Scottish Isle of Skye in the late 18th century. It’s mostly the story of Jim Kinneson, who turned 14 in 1952, and began to write down the family stories gradually passed down to him.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Mothers, daughters and a literary legacy

Review by Deborah Donovan

Julianna Baggot’s latest novel refuses to be confined to only one genre. Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders is a captivating multigenerational family saga, a love story and a mystery—tinged with a bit of fantasy.

Told in the voices of four women, the story begins with the difficult birth of Harriet Wolf, the matriarch, in a Baltimore suburb in 1900. Born to a fragile, depressed mother, and deemed by the doctor to be “not fit,” Harriet is sent by her father to the Maryland School for Feeble Minded Children, where she resides for 13 years. But life has other things in store for Harriet: After a roller-coaster childhood, she becomes a successful author of a series of best-selling books—as well as a mother to a daughter, Eleanor, who provides the novel’s second voice.

Eleanor has been abandoned by her husband and is still haunted by the fatherless state in which she was raised. Her mother’s series of six books have been published, beginning in 1947, to great acclaim—and there’s even a Harriet Wolf Society, established after Harriet’s death.

The final two voices are those of Eleanor’s daughters, and the chapters written in their words illuminate how events in both Eleanor’s and Harriet’s lives have rippled outward into their own. With the discovery of Harriet’s long-hidden seventh book in her beloved series her grandchildren, like the reader, begin to understand their grandmother’s amazing story—one of abandonment, love and lifelong commitment—which binds the three remaining women together.

Baggot’s mesmerizing tale of the resilient ties of motherhood and the bonds between sisters will resonate with a wide variety of readers.

Julianna Baggot’s latest novel refuses to be confined to only one genre. Harriet Wolf’s Seventh Book of Wonders is a captivating multigenerational family saga, a love story and a mystery—tinged with a bit of fantasy.
FictionDebut Fiction

An unsolved murder echoes in the halls of Harvard

Review by Deborah Donovan

Robin Kirman’s first novel, Bradstreet Gate, is set amidst the hallowed halls of Harvard, peopled mostly by elite young scholars and their erudite professors and mentors. Her story revolves around three of these students, whose lives become entwined over the course of their undergraduate years—and remain so over the next decade.

Georgia is the sought-after beauty, daughter of a famous photographer. Charlie, the son of blue-collar parents from whom he is estranged, sees Harvard as a stepping stone: a place to “forge as many connections for the future” as he can. He falls for Georgia almost immediately, launching a crush lasting four years, nearly until graduation. Like Charlie, Alice also sees admittance to Harvard’s class of 1997 as an escape: The daughter of Serbian immigrants, Alice has spent her childhood toggling between a father who embraces America and a mother who won’t even try.

Early in Kirman’s character-driven novel, a murder occurs on campus, just a week before graduation. The prime suspect is Rufus Storrow, an enigmatic young professor and new housemaster with a unique background—a graduate of West Point and a stint at the Pentagon, where he’d served as chief of the International Law Branch. One of Storrow’s students is the victim, and though circumstantial evidence points to him, he is never brought to trial.

How the murder affects Storrow and the three young graduates over the next decade constitutes the crux of Bradstreet Gate—guilt festered, lies were told and dreams abandoned. The unsolved crime will disappoint readers focused on the novel’s mystery elements; nevertheless Kirman’s psychological study of the lingering effects of tragedy on her characters over time engages from start to finish.

Robin Kirman’s first novel, Bradstreet Gate, is set amidst the hallowed halls of Harvard, peopled mostly by elite young scholars and their erudite professors and mentors. Her story revolves around three of these students, whose lives become entwined over the course of their undergraduate years—and remain so over the next decade.
FictionDebut Fiction

Far from the mainland

Review by Deborah Donovan

The setting of Sara Taylor’s ambitious and unique debut novel is The Shore—three islands off the coast of Virginia, just south of Maryland, “trailing out into the Atlantic Ocean like someone’s dripped paint.” Parksley Island is the biggest, with two bridges to the mainland and little villages all up its length. Off Parksley’s northeast coast is Chincoteague Island, where “the people with money” have summer homes; further east is Assateague Island, now a national park and home of the wild ponies.

In this atmospheric novel, each character is steeped in these islands and their lore—some leaving briefly, but all eventually returning, if only in their minds and memories. Taylor’s saga moves back and forth in time, highlighting characters at different moments in their lives, gradually revealing how their stories overlap and come together, like a slowly assembled jigsaw puzzle. The earliest inhabitant portrayed by the author is Medora, a mixed-race Shawnee woman who comes to the islands from Kentucky with her husband in 1876. Four generations later, we meet twins Sally and Mitch—Sally inheriting from Medora’s grandson “the gift” of bringing rain on command when the crops are dry.

Out-of-wedlock pregnancies, rape, drug addiction and murder are all part of Taylor’s story, with the isolation of the islands undoubtedly playing its own pivotal role in her characters’ decisions. Events on the mainland take their toll as well, as we learn of the slow demise of Assateague in the early 20th century: the closing of the school, kids “skiffing across the channel” to Chincoteague for classes, or not going at all. By the early 21st century, “the old families are dying out” and kids leave as soon as they can, few wanting to work in the chicken plants that are the only viable sources of jobs.

The Shore will appeal to readers who enjoy family sagas and like to lose themselves in an atmospheric setting—think Pat Conroy combined with Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The setting of Sara Taylor’s ambitious and unique debut novel is The Shore—three islands off the coast of Virginia, just south of Maryland, “trailing out into the Atlantic Ocean like someone’s dripped paint.”
FictionPopular Fiction

Three college friends take on adulthood

Review by Deborah Donovan

Screenwriter and author Lisa Lutz is well known for her zany mystery series starring Izzy Spellman, private eye. Here she jumps into mainstream women’s fiction with How to Start a Fire, an engaging portrait of female friendship spanning two decades. In 1993, when all three are students at UC Santa Cruz, freshman roommates Kate and Anna find George passed out on the lawn outside the party they had all attended. The three young women quickly become friends during their undergraduate years and beyond, the bonds between them tightening and loosening over the years.

Anna comes from a wealthy Boston family—her father preoccupied with business, her mother with shopping and keeping up appearances. Kate’s parents died when she was 8, and she was raised by her very traditional Czech grandfather. Her highest ambition is to eventually take over the family diner, where she has worked since she was 12. George, the gorgeous, athletic basketball player, is the outdoorsy type, working toward a forestry degree.

Just before graduation, Kate’s grandfather dies, sending her into a downward spiral of “retirement,” which consists mainly of watching TV for 12 hours at a stretch. At about the same time, George finds out her parents are divorcing due to her father’s infidelities. And Anna, who takes a fifth year to get a chemistry minor to bolster her med school applications, develops a serious drinking problem—leading to an episode involving all three women which will haunt them for at least the next 15 years.

Lutz gives the reader sporadic glimpses into their lives over that time frame, as they come together, drift apart and repeat the process over moves, marriages, adventures, tragedies and professional pitfalls. With wit and a gift for capturing the repartee between siblings and old friends, Lutz brings us a memorable and ultimately uplifting saga of three strong, unique women.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Screenwriter and author Lisa Lutz is well known for her zany mystery series starring Izzy Spellman, private eye. Here she jumps into mainstream women’s fiction with How to Start a Fire, an engaging portrait of female friendship spanning two decades. In 1993, when all three are students at UC Santa Cruz, freshman roommates Kate and Anna find George passed out on the lawn outside the party they had all attended. The three young women quickly become friends during their undergraduate years and beyond, the bonds between them tightening and loosening over the years.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Breaking out of domestic passivity

Review by Deborah Donovan

“Anna was a good wife, mostly.” So opens Jill Alexander Essbaum’s remarkable debut novel, the mesmerizing story of Anna Benz, an American expatriate who has lived in Zurich for nine years with her husband, Bruno—a Swiss banker—and their three children.

Hausfrau begins as Anna is finally trying to break out of her cocoon of passivity—of the feeling that “she rode a bus that someone else drove.” She enrolls in a language class, and at the same time begins weekly visits with Doktor Messerli, a Jungian therapist, whom she and Bruno hope will be able to get Anna to engage more with her surroundings.

Though Anna loves her children—Victor, 8; Charles, 6; and the baby, Polly Jean—she interacts with them on a very superficial level. “Everyone’s safe. Everyone’s fed,” she tells herself. She has no friends among the neighbors or her fellow parents. In other words, she’s lonely and bored, which is dangerous according to Doktor Messerli, for “bored women act on impulse.”

Anna’s impulses lead her—like her namesake, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—to multiple affairs, liaisons which make her feel momentarily alive. A Scottish expat in her language class and a friend of her brother-in-law provide potent, though ultimately trivial, dalliances. But she becomes obsessed with Stephen, an American professor on sabbatical, and it slowly becomes clear that their affair has had a lasting effect.

In chapters alternating between these affairs and Anna’s probing sessions with Doktor Messerli, the reader becomes sympathetic to her plight and gains a real sense of her “frantic scrambling to keep from being alone.” Essbaum brilliantly keeps up the tension as Anna bounces from one bad decision to the next, racing toward the inevitable conclusion. This completely engaging debut lingers long after the book is put down.
 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Anna was a good wife, mostly.” So opens Jill Alexander Essbaum’s remarkable debut novel, the mesmerizing story of Anna Benz, an American expatriate who has lived in Zurich for nine years with her husband, Bruno—a Swiss banker—and their three children.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A Minnesota resort with little respite

Review by Deborah Donovan

David Treuer’s fourth novel, Prudence, is set in northern Minnesota, near the Leech Lake Reservation where he grew up. It opens in August 1942, as Frankie Washburn is returning to the Pines, the resort owned by his parents, for a brief visit before joining the war as a bombardier. The reunion is fraught with negative memories from the past, especially the distance between Frankie and his father, Jonathan. Frankie’s sexual orientation, although never mentioned, is planted like a wall between them. Frankie’s mother is oblivious, her main concern in life being the upkeep of the Pines itself.

She is aided in this endeavor not by Jonathan, but by Felix, an older Indian who also served over the years as Frankie’s surrogate father, teaching him and Billy, a young Indian neighbor, all he knew about hunting, fishing, boating and crafting things out of wood.

Across the river from the Pines is a German POW camp, and on the day Frankie returns, a search is in progress for an escaped prisoner. Felix, Frankie, two of his friends from Princeton and Billy join in. The day ends in a tragedy that reverberates throughout the remainder of this acutely emotional novel, touching each character and dictating the course of each of their lives—most of all Prudence, a young Indian girl.

Prudence’s backstory is meted out gradually, and the way her life intersects with Frankie’s becomes the crux of this powerful story. In one of many flashbacks, Frankie muses on “the heavy fog of sadness” that hung over his childhood—a fog that engulfs Treuer’s mesmerizing, beautifully told novel like a cocoon.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

David Treuer’s fourth novel, Prudence, is set in northern Minnesota, near the Leech Lake Reservation where he grew up. It opens in August 1942, as Frankie Washburn is returning to the Pines, the resort owned by his parents, for a brief visit before joining the war as a bombardier. The reunion is fraught with negative memories from the past, especially the distance between Frankie and his father, Jonathan. Frankie’s sexual orientation, although never mentioned, is planted like a wall between them. Frankie’s mother is oblivious, her main concern in life being the upkeep of the Pines itself.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Inside the Bloomsbury group

Review by Deborah Donovan

Priya Parmar’s second novel opens an intimate, witty and highly entertaining window into the early 20th-century circle of writers, philosophers and artists known as London’s Bloomsbury Group. They met several times a week at the homes of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Vanessa’s brother and sister, Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Woolf). This erudite group also included the novelist E.M. Forster; biographer Lytton Strachey; artist Duncan Grant; art critic Roger Fry, curator of New York’s Metropolitan Museum; and economist John Maynard Keynes. The Stephen siblings—Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian and Thoby, the eldest brother— moved to the “bohemian hinterland” of Bloomsbury after their parents died, and Thoby’s Cambridge friends quickly adopted it as their favorite gathering place.

By means of Vanessa’s diary entries and letters, postcards and telegrams traveling back and forth among this large cast of characters, Parmar delves into not just their intellectual pursuits, but also their flirtations, affairs and sexual proclivities, which they reveal with little thought to discretion. But, as the title suggests, Parmar’s main focus is the Stephen sisters: Vanessa, the artist, and Virginia, the novelist, whose relationship was challenged by Vanessa’s 1907 marriage to Clive Bell.

Vanessa and Her Sister succeeds not only as a glimpse into this remarkable artistic family, but as an insightful portrayal of post-Victorian London as seen through the eyes of its increasingly uninhibited intellectual elite.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read a behind-the-book essay by Priya Parmar.

Priya Parmar’s second novel opens an intimate, witty and highly entertaining window into the early 20th-century circle of writers, philosophers and artists known as London’s Bloomsbury Group. They met several times a week at the homes of Vanessa and Clive Bell and Vanessa’s brother and sister, Adrian and Virginia Stephen (later Woolf). This erudite group also included the novelist E.M. Forster; biographer Lytton Strachey; artist Duncan Grant; art critic Roger Fry, curator of New York’s Metropolitan Museum; and economist John Maynard Keynes. The Stephen siblings—Vanessa, Virginia, Adrian and Thoby, the eldest brother— moved to the “bohemian hinterland” of Bloomsbury after their parents died, and Thoby’s Cambridge friends quickly adopted it as their favorite gathering place.
FictionHistorical Fiction

How the West was lost

Review by Deborah Donovan

Lin Enger’s moving and enlightening second novel resonates emotionally and intellectually on several levels: as an homage to the vanished American bison, a reflection on the forceful removal of Northern Plains Indians from their homelands and an engaging family saga peopled with characters who could have been this Midwestern author’s own ancestors.

The High Divide opens in the summer of 1886, when Ulysses Pope, husband to Norwegian-born Gretta and father to Eli, 16, and younger son Danny, abruptly disappears from their western Minnesota home. Shortly thereafter, Eli finds a letter to his father from a woman in Bismarck—so he and Danny hop a freight train west, following their only clue to their father’s whereabouts. Gretta, in turn, embarks on her own journey, “with two dollars left in her purse and not a single blood relative in all the North American continent—aside from her own two sons, whose whereabouts were unknown to her.” She instead heads east to St. Paul, the home of Ulysses’ sister, who shares details of her brother’s military years that were unknown to Gretta—and which may somehow be connected to his disappearance now, nearly two decades later.

Enger entwines Ulysses’ odyssey with the actual Hornaday Expedition of 1886, during which the curator of the National Museum in Washington, D.C., now the Smithsonian, sought to kill a large number of the vanishing bison—paradoxically, to stuff and preserve them for future generations.

Though the reader gradually learns the facts behind Ulysses’ disappearance, his ultimate search is for forgiveness for his part in what he now knows is the decimation of the Cheyenne, Crow, Lakota and Blackfeet tribes that were part of the land on which he was raised. Enger’s gripping story is a marvelous blend of strong characters and a brilliant depiction of a land and time now lost.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Lin Enger’s moving and enlightening second novel resonates emotionally and intellectually on several levels: as an homage to the vanished American bison, a reflection on the forceful removal of Northern Plains Indians from their homelands and an engaging family saga peopled with characters who could have been this Midwestern author’s own ancestors.

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