Kim Barnes

This book is split into multiple parts that go back and forth over decades. It's multiple POVs in third person, sometimes changing every few pages, somethings every few paragraphs. Part I is 182 pages long in the ebook I read, and is completely pointless. The story doesn't begin until page 183, which is Part II. The author does an excellent job distilling the information of the previous 182 pages into just a few. The few pages and sprinkles of paragraphs are spread neatly. It's like the author and editor realized the first 182 pages weren't needed, but forgot to remove them. I resent that my time was wasted; I'd been hoping for a story sooner than that.

Deracotte is utterly useless as a character and reinforces my belief that the story doesn't begin until Part II. In Part I, he moves out to a frontier with his young wife who is from old money. Neither can do chores, but Helen learns: to cook. split logs, plant food--farm and homestead things. Deracotte does not. He never even tries. He doesn't even want to be a physician, for which he has training, and wants to be a pharmacist. He takes no steps to change his career, though. He is MISERABLE, but WON'T MOVE HOME. His wife's death makes everything worse. All he does in response is fish and get hooked on drugs, and forget his daughter exists. Manny is a young farmhand who does all Deracotte's chores for him, cares for his daughter from her infant years to teens, and later, has raised her all his own. WHAT A WASTE OF PAGES. HAVE MANNY BE THE STEPDAD, AND BOTH BIO-PARENTS DIE SOONER. That's clearly what the book was angling for. It was just too afraid to name it. Rrgh! The daughter, named Elise, has maternal grandparents who try to get custody of her. Somehow, this was successfully fought and I was furious. Manny was in over his head. The grandparents, from a financial perspective alone, would have more resources for caretaking. It would especially have made for a more interesting story!

Instead, Elise's latest love interest comes to town. He's a preacher's kid. That can't be easy. He...gets Elise to convert to a form of Christianity that involves immersion baptisms, speaking in tongues, fainting, and dancing; all after attending six sermons. Here, it's revealed she has synesthesia. I was -delighted- to find this was a book I'd been looking for, and remembered the ending and laughed Worth it to sit through such a boring, wasteful book: turns out I'd been looking for it for two separate reasons, for awhile now. When I first read this, it was utterly forgettable except for the synesthesia as a subplot, and another incident. The preacher's wife is understandably disgusted and furious with Elise for giving her son a blowjob while the preacher and his wife are maybe four feet away. This happens at the end of chapter fourteen. Elise's synesthesia happens in chapter fifteen. By chapter sixteen, Elise is in an inaccurate mental hospital with over-the-top mental patients. Luke shows up and I wondered, irritably and disgusted, if Elise was going to give him a public blowjob too. No, but he sticks his arms in the water while she bathes and they have sex on the floor. She gets pregnant.

For a book that portrayed eating disorders and mental hospitals respectfully and accurately, I recommend "Wasted" by Marya Hornbacher. This book's epilogue didn't feel like one; it felt like a chapter transition. I was glad it was finally over.… (mehr)

This is a magical, heartbreaking, and elemental book which nonetheless makes the reader want to smack at least two of the main characters upside the head and tell them to stop being such immature, self-centered, entitled babies.

It's also a story of obsession and loss and the lengths we will travel to fill the aching emptiness within.

Thomas Deracotte and his pampered, pregnant wife are perhaps the worst possible candidates to rehabilitate a deserted farm in the wilderness of north central Idaho in 1960. Totally unprepared by both personality and life experience, their ambitious but poorly planned adventure is doomed to failure. Self-indulgent and willful Helen spends her days napping and reading, lolling half-dressed around the tent meant only as a temporary shelter, while Thomas ignores the crumbling buildings and weed-choked fields of his fantasy farm to indulge in his real passion, fly-fishing in the river that runs through the property. Neither is making any effort (or, therefore, progress) toward their stated goal of rehabilitating the farm or to have Thomas open a small medical practice in the closest village.

Local hired men and a homeless boy are enlisted to save the hapless couple from their own navel-gazing paralysis, and by the time Helen's pregnancy comes to a terrifying and bloody end, young Manny has taken on the curious role of hired hand, foster son, master farmer, nursemaid, and odd-man-out in an increasingly fragile and unhealthy relationship between Helen and Thomas. The relationship becomes even more fraught when Helen drowns under suspicious circumstances, and her daughter Elise is left to grow up in almost primitive isolation with her father and Manny, her ties to reality growing ever more tenuous.

Filled with flawed by realistic characters and set against the magnificent isolation of the forest around them, the novel teeters between tragedy and hope as it tests the boundaries of what love makes possible.… (mehr)