The Home Place by Carrie La Seur
My rating: 3/5 cats
so, this author decided to call me out for my review of her book:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carrie-…
i would love to respond to her there, but i’m not going to join facebook just for that. so – if you want to join me here, ms. le seur, for a fruitful discussion about gender and genre and exactly who is dismissing whom, feel free to disregard the warning about authors approaching reviewers on here, because i’m not looking for a fight, but i am curious about some of your assertions.
this is a novel about a successful, if tightly-wound, woman who returns to her rural hometown in montana after her younger sister’s suspicious death and finds that why yes, you can go home again, but that home is loaded with secrets and dangers and too many memories.
alma left home as a teenager shortly after the death of both of her parents, and never looked back. she left behind a brother, a younger sister, and chance, a boy whose heart she broke. in her absence, her sister vicky went to stay with an aunt and uncle and grew into a wayward party girl, had a daughter of her own, and died one evening, of “exposure” when she drunkenly wandered out into the cold. her daughter brittany made several calls to family that evening, but for the first time, no one came to help – tired of vicki’s drama and busy with their own lives and problems. there’s plenty of guilt and regret to go around.
when alma arrives, she reconnects with the family she left behind – her grandmother, her aunt and uncle, her brother, brittany, and chance, now a strapping man with a daughter of his own, but conveniently, no wife. she learns that residents of the town, particularly the elderly, have been aggressively pressured to sell their land to a mining company, that her own family house, “the home place,” has been targeted, and she begins to suspect that vicki’s death may not have been accidental.
the good stuff:
this book has a really good sense of place. i am a fan of smalltown narratives, and she captures the insular DIY spirit and tradition very well, while also beautifully depicting the vast landscape of montana.
although alma made her escape and never regretted it, once she is back home she feels the pull of “home,” and understands its appeal, and how difficult it is to articulate this appeal to an outsider. in a conversation with chance:
“Nobody from outside ever has had any idea what I come from…There’s no way I could explain”
It’s never occurred to her that it’s possible to communicate between those two worlds.
“That’s just it. How can you show what our lives are without demeaning the struggle people go through every day to keep one of these old places together, keep food on the table? How do you show how hard it is – not romanticize it – without discounting the richness? Or are we just an anachronism, like the Amish?”
also, this passage, which observes the tenacity of women who live on the sometimes unforgiving land:
Alma knows that Helen’s passivity hides the same thing that led the wagons westward, the same nerve and sense of duty that drove her great-great-grandmother away from the fire on cold winter nights to midwife new mothers up and down the valley, riding into bitter storms on a great draft horse, never failing, never brought down by the fear and fatigue rode with her every mile. The years of deprivation and isolation made the women like winter aspens – bare of ornament, stark, giving the appearance of death, yet green and resilient at the core, and tied to the place and the people with a vast network of unseen roots. Eternal. The men have always been strong, but the women have been steel.
and this one, which acknowledges the relationship difficulties between two career-oriented, busy people, and the cracks that can eventually break people apart:
These aren’t things they talk about, not part of the script. She might like to know, but it’s too late. Jean-Marc is busy, and she’ll let it pass, like a hundred moments in the past when she wanted to reach out to him and drew back because it would be too much work to know, to care. There is never enough time.
so, there are some solid moments of writing in this, some good insights and descriptions of the struggle between responsibility and desire, and how the past is always lying in wait.
the less good:
alma is just not a particularly likable or sympathetic character. nothing seems to really affect her, and she reads kind of flat. she’s selfish and judgmental, yet somehow manages to attract and sustain the interest of loyal-hearted men. but for a reader, she’s hard to connect to, and i don’t think the author realized she was writing an antiheroine – i think we are meant to root for her. she lost my support when View Spoiler »
the book is just kind of middlebrow. it’s a perfectly fine for a book club where the wine is more of a draw than the book. it’s like one of those books oprah used to choose for her book club when it first started – very “safe” women’s fiction. it’s a family mystery with nothing new and the old stuff is capably done; but there’s no sparkle. it’s fine – it will hold your interest, there’s nothing glaringly bad about it, but it isn’t bringing anything new to the table of the family mystery novel, and the resolution is a little too easy.
and here’s the thing. i know that genre fiction has a stigma in some circles, and it doesn’t appeal to as large an audience as whatever we are calling women’s fiction these days, since that’s apparently a sexist term, even though it is a recognizable subgenre of lit fic with its own appeal factors, but this should have had a fence slapped on the cover and been marketed as a romance novel.
there’s not a lot of intercourse-having in it, but it seems to fulfill all of the other expectations of a romance novel. we have a love triangle: View Spoiler » which just reduces them from characters to archetypes, and is definitely a convention for male characters within the romance genre.
the only thing that is different between this and the romance novels i have read is the pacing – romance novels tend to be faster-paced with fewer descriptive passages, but the story itself – the feisty heroine solving the crime single-handedly while men patiently wait for her attention, the way clues are casually dropped in conversations for her while the police can’t seem to make any headway in the investigation, and a completely cartoonish mining-villain. View Spoiler »
and i’m not saying that romance novels are bad – i am a kindly old readers’ advisor who doesn’t make qualitative judgments, but romance novels tend to be more episodic than contemplative, and generally a little less subtle in their characterization. and that villain is anything but subtle.
one last gripe, regarding the racial issues that are only superficially addressed in the book. kudos for accurately depicting the suspicion and resentment that occur in small, close-knit, mostly white communities towards their minority residents, in this case, native americans. and kudos for showing that alma is above all of that, in her familiarity with and respect for their culture and customs. but to have the native character be a part of this police force that she outsleuths doesn’t seem to be doing him any favors. he is affable and competent and all, but he is basically just used as stock landscape, like most of the men in this book.
but i feel like i am being harsh. this book is not outstanding, but not terrible by any means. i just feel that if it were more honestly marketed as a romance novel, albeit a more ambitious romance novel than some, it would stand out more to its audience.
