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Summary
Summary
In this evocative first novel, a young woman returns to her rural Vermont hometown in the wake of a devastating storm to search for her missing mother and unravel a powerful family secret
It's August 2011, and Tropical Storm Irene has just wreaked havoc on Vermont, flooding rivers and destroying homes. One thousand miles away--while tending bar in New Orleans--Vale receives a call and is told that her mother, Bonnie, has disappeared. Despite a years-long estrangement from Bonnie, Vale drops everything and returns home to look for her.
Though the hometown Vale comes back to is not the one she left eight years earlier, she finds herself falling back into the lives of the family she thought she'd long since left behind. As Vale begins her search, the narrative opens up and pitches back and forth in time to follow three generations of women--a farming widow, a back-to-the-land dreamer, and an owl-loving hermit--as they seek love, bear children, and absorb losses. All the while, Vale's search has her unwittingly careening toward a family origin secret more stunning than she ever imagined.
Written with a striking sense of place, Heart Spring Mountain is an arresting novel about returning home, finding hope in the dark, and of the power of the land--and the stories it harbors--to connect and to heal. It's also an absorbing exploration of the small fractures that can make families break-and the lasting ties that bind them together.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Three generations of women seek comfort and closure in storm-wracked Vermont in this tender debut novel by MacArthur (after the story collection Half Wild). When heroin addict and mother Bonnie goes missing during 2011's Tropical Storm Irene, her daughter, Vale, leaves a bartending job in New Orleans to return to the small town of her birth and find her. Still living on the family's mountain are Bonnie's nonagenarian aunt and once-guardian, Hazel, and widowed cousin-in-law, Deb. Although Vale's return is welcome, it churns up their own resentments about living such an isolated existence. The novel is told from each of their perspectives: Vale digs for family lore before it is lost to the passage of time and death, Deb confronts tragedies of the past and present, and Hazel spirals through long-hidden memories. Secondary characters are just as strong as the narrators: Bonnie's mother, who treasured her cabin in the woods; Deb's husband, whose silence made him complicit in tragedy; and Bonnie, who relishes the hurricane's wrath from a perch on a bridge. The resulting narrative is nuanced, poetic, and evocative; MacArthur empathetically depicts each of her characters in their wounded but hopeful glory. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A woman returning to her native Vermont to locate her missing mother uncovers a submerged family history.The debut novel by MacArthur (Half Wild: Stories, 2016) opens in 2011, as the remnants of Hurricane Irene besiege a rural Vermont town. Bonnie, a heroin addict, has disappeared during the flooding, prompting her daughter, Vale, to leave New Orleans, where she makes ends meet tending bar and stripping, to help find her. With few trails to follow, though, she mainly spends the ensuing months reconnecting with her extended family and locals, particularly her great-aunt Hazel, whose grip on reality is slipping, and her aunt Deb, a one-time commune dweller who still proudly adheres to a back-to-the-land lifestyle. (The novel's cultural touchstones are feminist and activist icons like Henry David Thoreau, Grace Paley, Frantz Fanon, and Patti Smith.) MacArthur alternates narrators, shifting not just from Vale to Hazel to Deb, but to notebooks written by Vale's proto-hippie maternal grandmother, Lena, giving the narrative a lyrical, earth-mother vibe. As Vale chats up family, reads the notebooks, and pulls up archives to seek evidence of her Native American heritage, MacArthur's theme is clear: the various ways women struggle to get past abuse and disrespect. (Vale's discovery of an infidelity in the past adds another layer of complication.) The family tree can get tangled, a love-interest subplot delivers little heat, and the story is occasionally pockmarked with only-in-a-novel dialogue and actions ("Find me!" Vale cries after flinging her clothes off in a rainstorm). But MacArthur ably sustains multiple narrative threads and voices while sympathetically exploring more than four generations' worth of hard times. And though the story is somber, there's enough room in the narrative for a sliver of optimism. As Deb tells Vale, "No radical change comes during good times."A fecund and contemplative feminist family saga. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The call came in the middle of a dangerous storm. Vale could barely make out the words her Aunt Deb was shouting above the lashing rain and wind, but she heard enough to understand her mother had gone missing. Vale returns to her hometown in Vermont to search for her mother, a manic, troubled woman whose oversize personality shines through Vale's memories of her. As the days pass with only tantalizing clues as to her mother's whereabouts, Vale begins to uncover family secrets on the land where they've lived for generations. The members of Vale's family tell their own stories Deb, who came to live on a commune but found another life; Vale's great-aunt, whose aging mind is losing its grip on reality; her eccentric loner grandmother, who revels in the company of an owl. In her quietly powerful debut novel, MacArthur demonstrates a commanding ability to weave meaning from separate narrative threads, exploring how the impact of a person's choices can echo through generations, even as a storm washes the past away.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
DEBUT First novelist -MacArthur (Half Wild) spins a tale of family and history in this multigenerational novel set in rural Vermont. During the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, Bonnie, a drug addict, decides to view the scene from a bridge over the raging river. Her daughter Vale lives in New Orleans, tending bar and stripping for a living, but drops everything to return home when she hears her mother is missing. As Vale reconnects with her family and digs into the past, the story line presents several points of view: of her great-aunt Hazel, still living on the mountain; her aunt Deb, who once was part of a commune; and her eccentric maternal grandmother Lena, who inhabited a cabin with a one-eyed owl. Through Vale's search and the group's memories, the tangled story of the past, both hidden and known, comes into focus. -VERDICT Although the point-of-view jumps can be confusing and the narrative takes its time gaining momentum, the characters are richly drawn and authentic, so this book should be warmly welcomed by readers of contemporary literary fiction that plumbs the depths of rural American experience, especially that of women. [See Prepub Alert, 7/17/17.]-Nancy H. Fontaine, Norwich P.L., VT © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.