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.
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.
