Heart Spring Mountain by Robin MacArthur
by Robin MacArthur
Vale, a stripper in New Orleans learns that a tropical storm has wreaked havoc in her hometown in Vermont and that her mother, Bonnie, is missing. The two are estranged, but Vale feels pulled home to find her mother. While there, searching, she reconnects with members of her family as well as family members long deceased, learning a deeply held secret that her missing heroin addict mother knows nothing about. She also learns about her family's buried history, something that reconnects her to the land (and the mountain) she grew up on.
The characters include Hazel, Vale's great-aunt who is in the grips of dementia and who raised her mother; Deb, her mother's sister-in-law, who is an aging hippie missing her own son away in Guatemala, and who still hasn't come to grips with the loss of her husband many years before; and Lena, whose notebooks tell of her love affair with her sister Hazel's husband Lex, the father of both Hazel's son Stephen and Lena's daughter Bonnie. Other characters appear and enrich the narrative, but these core characters lead us through the novel, which ultimately explores generations of hardship and the struggle of the women to overcome past neglect and abuse. Vale searches for her Bonnie in this rural town besieged by poverty and drug addiction, and has to come to terms with Bonnie's reckless spirit, which ultimately led to her disappearance.
The prose is poetic and deep, sometimes painful in its explicit simplicity. The environment rife with sadness and nostalgia, a place settled deep in the characters' bones, and one they are called back to and can never truly seem to leave. The story contemplates the connection between members of a family and the land they call home, and how the past impacts the present. How the past is always present, how our ancestors traumas are written in our own DNA. MacArthur is saying that we owe everything we are to those who have come before us.
I liked this book a lot and read it in my search for comp titles to the book I am writing. I give Heart Spring Mountain 4 stars.
Comments
Post a Comment