fiction

Much Ado about Nothing

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I usually review books, not films, but I have to make an exception here. It is rare that a film is so much more than the text, and here is a great example. Adapted and directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring himself and Emma Thompson, plus an all-star cast, this is my favorite summer film. It brings Shakespeare’s play to life beyond what you could best imagine.

First off, there’s the beginning. The entire film takes place at a huge villa in Tuscany. The opening scenes—and the transcendent music—evoke the peace and beauty of rural life and the excitement of the men returning from the battlefield.

This is catnip for anyone who has ever dreamed of renting a villa in Tuscany: vineyarda, women in flowing white dresses picnicking among the olive trees with music and bread and wine. Then come the stirring hero shots of the men galloping along the road. And—balm to my practical soul—everyone bathes and dresses themselves in clean linen to meet, all to the thrilling soundtrack. Such joy!

Of course complications ensue. So does comedy, this being Shakespeare, after all. Brilliantly paced, brilliantly acted.

At no point does Shakespeare’s language seem anything other than utterly normal, thanks to the quality of the cast. I have to single out Denzel Washington whose dialogue seems even more natural, if that’s possible. What a gift, to make this language seem everyday!

Films based on books or plays often cut corners to keep the running time down to the standard limit. Often they choose one theme or story line among many to follow. This is the rare exception where the film exceeds the reading experience.

There is so much joy here, so much celebration of life! Give yourself the gift of streaming this film today. With a hey, nonny, nonny!

Is there a book or play you’ve read where the film is actually better?

Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy

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Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica.

The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. The scientific community believes the Arctic terns are extinct, but Franny does find the last few. However, without fish to eat along the way, the terns might not make it to Antarctica, so she must find a way to follow along with them. She must know if any of them make it safely.

Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat with a curmudgeonly captain and quirky crew. Unable to make a living off the meager fish in the sea and hounded by people onshore who are furious that the fishermen are killing the few remaining fish, the sailors are lured by Franny’s promise of a last big haul. So they set off, using her instruments to follow the terns she banded.

But Franny is more than a loner; she is a leaver. She says:

It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

What and who she has left and why are unclear. Where is the husband she writes to every day? What crime has she committed? Will she find her mother? The tales of her losses begin to unspool in side currents, her dark secrets roiling the story by tossing the reader back and forth in time.

Most of the people in my book club were unsettled by these time shifts and confused by the fragments of several stories that only gradually begin to cohere. The fragmentation, confusion, and dissociation reflect Franny’s state. She, too, is ready to become extinct.

The themes of loss and leaving and migrations are multi-layered, but McConaghy treads lightly. It was only when I finally wrenched myself away from the book at the end that I was able to appreciate how intimately they permeated the story. I also appreciated that, while this future is only to likely to occur and pretty soon, the book is different form other dystopian novels, not frantic or furious. It is a quiet book.

And truly a magnificent one. The writing, the world-building, the offbeat characters, the way McConaghy inspired my immediate allegiance to this damaged woman and her quest: all excellent. My favorite part was when she was on the ship—I so enjoyed the crew members, their community of oddballs and their treatment of Franny.

Because of my outsized love for this story, my disappointment at the end was also outsized. As we drew closer, I wondered how the author would wrap it up. Since I had sometimes wondered if Franny was an unreliable narrator, I was even prepared for it to have all been a dream. However, the actual end seemed to have been written for a different book altogether, so at odds was it with the rest of the book. On this point, everyone in the book club agreed.

One person noted how odd it was that we kept saying we loved the book even as we discussed what bothered us. For example, many members struggled to read it, confused by the fragmented plots and the time shifts. Several said they could only read a little at a time, though I barreled through it, as did at least one other person. Yet we did love it.

We loved the tenderness of this story. We loved the crows who brought her presents and the sailors who gruffly tried to help her. We believed in her mission, we who have seen the chestnut trees disappear, the wild dogwoods, and now the beeches. We’ve tracked the ups and downs of the crabs, oysters and rockfish in the Chesapeake, and participated in bird species counts. In our long lives we’ve known leave-takings and losses.

Read this book. Be prepared to be moved. And moved to action, even if it is only to go outside to appreciate the bright zinnias and sunflowers, to hear the whir of hummingbirds at the feeder, to see the deer moving like ghosts among the trees.

What have you lost that you can never get back? What journeys are you compelled to take?

Author Tours

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When I went to Toronto many years ago to visit my son who had moved there, he took me on a tour of the city to show me the places in Michael Ondaatje’s masterful novel In the Skin of a Lion. I had loved the novel, along with the other Can Lit books my son had recommended (Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, David Adams Richards, Margaret Laurence, etc.) at that time not available in the U.S. Somehow, seeing the actual places mentioned in Ondaatje’s book made it come alive for me in a different way.

Perhaps you have had this experience. If you read a book set in a place you know well, you have a different relationship with the story. When I read an Anne Tyler book or one by Laura Lippman, I recognise the places in and near Baltimore that they mention, and the story becomes that much more real.

A few years ago when I was in Edinburgh, I went on an Ian Rankin tour. His books are true works of literary art, and I highly recommend them. I first found one in a Toronto bookstore; they weren’t available in the U.S. and the online bookstore thing hadn’t taken hold yet. He immediately became one of my favorite authors, and I’ve enjoyed watching his immense talent increase with every book, especially those featuring detective John Rebus.

The tour was fun, taking us to places that cropped up in his books as well as to buildings where he and fellow Edinburgh authors lived. I also made an effort to look on my own for things referenced in his books, such as the miniature coffins found on Arthur’s seat and Rebus’s favorite bar.

Recently I enjoyed a tour in Quebec City that took us to places mentioned in Louise Penny’s Bury the Dead. Seeing where the incidents in the story took place, following Inspector Gamache’s footsteps, enjoying the restaurants and bistros mentioned made the story real in an entirely different way. If nothing else, I saw how short a distance it was in some cases from one place to another, making it easier to understand how Gamache could move so quickly between them.

Our tour guide Marie had some inside information: Penny herself had stayed in the house where Gamache stayed with his friend Emil in the story. Marie had seen inside and verified that it matched the description, just as we could verify the descriptions of other, more public places mentioned.

Marie speculated that Penny had eaten in these restaurants, ridden the funicular, visited the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. I thought: Of course she did! That’s how you research a book. All good writers do that.

When you travel, I encourage you to read novels set there and, if possible, take a tour of the places mentioned. Let me know how that changes your perception of the book.

Have you ever taken a tour of places mentioned in an author’s book? If you read a book set in a place you know well, how is the experience different?

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

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When Tookie is sent to federal prison for moving a dead body—it was to help a friend and Tookie didn’t know what else she was moving—a teacher sends her a dictionary. The study of words saves her sanity. Sentence, for example, is not just an independent thought or expression. It is not just a mathematical equation or logical statement. It is both a judgment and a punishment. She says that “the most important skill I’d gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention.”

When she is unexpectedly released after ten years, she goes to work at an independent bookstore in Minneapolis specialising in indigenous history, fiction, memoir and poetry, a stand-in for Erdrich’s own Birchbark Books. Native American herself, Tookie is fascinated to learn about her own culture and loves finding just the right book for a hard-to-please customer.

Less enjoyable are the wanna-bes, the White people who wish for or actually claim native American heritage, such as the domineering Flora who comes in every day bearing unwanted gifts until she unexpectedly dies, holding a book. From then on, her uneasy spirit haunts the bookstore, at first seen only by Tookie and later by the others who work there.

I would have been happy to live in this book for five times as long as it took to read it. I love Tookie’s voice as narrator: low-key, expecting the worst, appreciating what isn’t, aware of her own faults. I love her courage and her passion. She adores her now-husband Pollux despite the fact that he was the tribal policeman who arrested her, and has a testy relationship with his daughter Metta who turns up with a baby.

Then comes 2020. Up to that point, the impact of the larger society has already been felt. In addition to the wanna-bes and the issues independent bookstores face, Tookie says, “I was on the wrong side of the statistics. Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned,” and knows how lucky she is to have found a job after prison.

We are so engrossed in her ordinary and extraordinary life, that her reaction to the pandemic, the shutdown, George Floyd’s murder and the protests in her city mirror our own, making the unexpected familiar.

I love the easy mix of social classes in this story and the friendships that develop. I love the understated humor and the way current events are folded into the story. I love the fluid boundaries between past and present, reason and spirituality, those we hold dear and those who haunt us.

Most of all I love the books: title after title bandied about as Tookie tries to find the right book for a discerning customer or one-up a co-worker. I’m poring over the list provided for free by the publisher, checking off the ones I’ve read, highlighting the ones I want to read.

Tookie’s is a different world from the one James MacBride conjures in Deacon King Kong, but it is equally vibrant and so real I felt I knew these people. What a wonderful book!

What’s your favorite Louise Erdrich book?

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

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I read this first novel by the author of the Gilead series a long time ago. Or rather, I sank into it, stunned by its richness. Sisters Ruth and Lucille are being brought up by their grandmother on the outskirts of Fingerbone, a small town uncomfortably situated on a lake somewhere in the northwest part of the U.S. “It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.”

Whether it is flooding the town or receding into its secrets, the lake is a powerful force. The girls’ grandfather died when his train ran off the bridge over the lake, and their mother, after dropping them at their grandmother’s, drove off a cliff into the same lake.

After their grandmother, who retained a few social ties with the town, dies, Aunt Sylvie takes over caring for the girls. However, her idea of providing for them is to hoard empty cans and newspapers, to buy them sparkly pink slippers instead of school clothes. Sylvie prefers the windows open and the lights off, regardless of the season or clock.

With Ruthie as our guide, we experience the wonders and costs of eccentricity. The girls must carry their losses and construct a way to order their lives. They must decide whether to take refuge in the ordinary world or remain open to the revelations that it masks.

On this second reading, I was again entranced by the voice of the novel. Slightly old-fashioned, deliberate, unsentimental, it not only adds substance to the strangeness of this household, but also moves fluidly between actual description and metaphysical exploration. Details—unexpected, alive, perfect—make it work. For example Ruth describes the scenes her grandfather painted on the bed, chest and wardrobe he made, and then says:

Each of these designs had been thought better of and painted out, but over years the white paint had absorbed them, floated them up just beneath the surface. I was always reminded of pictures, images, in places where images never were, in marble, in the blue net of veins at my wrists, in the pearled walls of seashells.

This time I was better able to appreciate the extraordinary choreography of the book. In only the second paragraph we are told:

The terrain on which the town itself is built is relatively level, having once belonged to the lake. It seems there was a time when the dimensions of things modified themselves, leaving a number of puzzling margins, as between the mountains as they must have been and the mountains as they are now, or between the lake as it once was and the lake as it is now. Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return.

Margins such as these—fluid, unstable, unreliable—are explored throughout the book. The sounds in the night may be ghosts or crickets. Perhaps what has disappeared may be distilled by remembering, desolation healed by creating small strongholds. Perhaps even the most final margin would yield to someone like Sylvie who “felt the life of perished things.”

There are a few other images that also recur in the story, accruing meaning, adjusting our perception of the characters and their choices. This is an element of creative writing that I particularly enjoy, and Robinson handles it beautifully.

What really makes this unusual story work, for me anyway, is the absence of censure. The townspeople may judge Sylvie, the mother, the girls, but the author does not. There are only choices, neither good nor bad, just choices.

I look forward to reading this book again in a few years. Who knows what I will find?

Have you reread a favorite novel and found it even richer than you remembered?

A Fortnight in September, by R. C. Sherriff

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Touted as an escape from the pandemic, this 1931 novel follows a lower-middle-class London family as they go on their annual vacation to the seaside holiday spot Bognor Regis.

Mr. Stevens carefully updates his Marching Orders, the list of what each person needs to do to prepare for the trip, not out of an autocratic need to control but from a genuine desire to have things go well for everyone. Mrs. Stevens hides her terror of the sea because her family always has such a good time. Dick at 17 and Mary at 20 good-humoredly go along with their father—no teenage rebellion here. Only young Ernie kicks up a ruckus, wanting to bring his toy yacht even though it is inappropriate for the sea.

They always stay at the same place, the Seaview, even though the place and its landlady are not aging well. But the Stevens family are loyal to the good old Seaview. This gentle narrative lets us enjoy the peculiar pleasure of stepping out of ordinary life into a brief vacation, one that is so much the same every year that it has become a ritual.

While the pace rarely quickens beyond a brief flutter, such as the one over whether to rent a slightly more expensive beach hut, one of the interesting threads in this story is about time. Of course, there is the cliché about time racing when you’re doing something fun and standing still when you’re not, and the changes time is bringing to the Seaview and Mrs. Huggett. However, there are also more interesting insights, such as this one:

They had reached the strange, disturbing little moment that comes in every holiday: the moment when suddenly the tense excitement of the journey collapses and fizzles out, and you are left, vaguely wondering, … [w]hether the holiday, after all, is only a dull anti-climax to the journey.

There’s also the way Mr. Stevens makes little special occasions and traditions for his family “to strengthen the links of a home.” And the way this annual vacation becomes a time outside of time for the family, though haunted by its finite nature.

The man on his holidays becomes the man he might have been, the man he could have been, had things worked out a little differently. All men are equal on their holidays: all are free to dream their castles without thought of expense, or skill of architect. Dreams based upon such delicate fabric must be nursed with reverence and held away from the crude light of tomorrow week.

I was alone in my book club and seemingly alone as well among the avalanche of positive reviews at being dismayed by the portrayal of this family. They seemed unrealistically superficial to me. For example, they do everything together and are unfailingly sweet to each other. There’s no interpersonal tension; they are a whole family of Beths from Little Women.

Of course, they do fit in with the saccharine characters in popular stories of the time, something I tried to remind myself. And the story is clearly meant to be a diversion, a beach read rather than a literary experiment. No point expecting the complexity of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves published the same year.

But what I kept coming back to is the class issue. In the extract from the author’s autobiography appended to the book, Sherriff says while on holiday at Bognor he enjoyed watching people and trying to imagine their lives. Eventually, he decided to choose one at random and “build up an imaginary story of their annual holiday by the sea.”

And the people he imagined are simple people, so simple as to seem fairly brainless. They are content with their tiny, tightly constrained lives, with rarely a thought beyond—on rare occasions—career advancement or lack thereof (Mr. Stevens), having a little time to herself at night (Mrs. Stevens), cricket (Dick and Ernie), or possible romance (Mary).

Mr. Stevens buys a Times for the train because he likes “the feeling of culture it gave out” and enjoys a few little articles that make him wonder about things that he might “find out about . . . one day, when he had the time.” Mr. Stevens goes for a long walk every year to think things through. This year Dick goes on one too. So we are treated to an extended look at their stunted and unimaginative thought processes.

Yes, it’s a restful and sweet novel with many little nuggets that gave me a jolt of recognition, thinking Oh, yes, that’s exactly how it is. I just wish the author could have looked past the snobbish stereotype that the lower classes are just simple people living simple lives and perfectly happy that way. In his famous play and film Journey’s End about WWI, Sherriff gives Mason the cook much more depth, enough to equal the officers, though that may be the brilliance of Toby Jones’s performance rather than the written lines.

In this book, there is no hint of that war, except perhaps in Mr. Stevens refusal to look more deeply into the news. However, here another interesting thread is about change. The vacation is an annual ritual, carefully reenacted, yet there is the parents’ concern that Dick and Mary might be getting too old for it and want to do something else or perhaps stay somewhere else. We do see both young adults starting, however tentatively, to think of life beyond the family.

Then there are the changes to the Seaview and Mrs. Huggett. Most of all, as one member of my book club pointed out, there’s the fact in only eight years a power-hungry autocrat will start another war, one that will devastate England and change their lives forever.

What is your favorite beach read this summer?

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

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After the carnage of the Great War, many women in England found themselves condemned to spinsterhood. That’s not why in 1922 Frances Wray remains unmarried and living with her mother in South London, where their lives are circumscribed by the endless domestic chores, church on Sundays, and occasional visits with a few friends.

Frances does the domestic work, her mother being elderly and still grieving for the loss of her sons in the war. They once had a servant, but after the death of Frances’s father, the two women discovered that he had left them nothing but debts. By the time of the story, they have decided that their only recourse is to take in lodgers, dressing up the idea by calling them paying guests.

Enter Lillian and Leonard Barber. Members of the “clerk class,” they take up residence in the newly created apartment on the second floor and quickly change the atmosphere of the house, with their lively music and visits from Lillian’s rambunctious, working class family. Still the Wray women are more puzzled than distressed. What upsets the applecart is Frances’s growing attraction to Lillian.

The author brilliantly captures the peculiar intimacy of families sharing a wall, something I’m familiar with from living in rowhouses, triple-deckers, and a duplex (aka semi-detached). You try not to listen, but nonetheless find yourself having an unwelcome familiarity with their routines. Sometimes you even speculate about what’s going on over there.

Vividly captured as well is the domestic life of the period. The author gives us enough of Frances’s routine to understand what a burden housework was before the “labor-saving” devices we are accustomed to, without letting those passages become boring. She does this by exquisite detail, carefully chosen, and sometimes by making them part of action scenes.

I was surprised and impressed by the author’s handling of the class differences between the three families. Though never coming out and saying something like They are not our sort, Mrs. Wray remains aloof from the Barbers and Lillian’s family. However, Frances begins to enter the lives of both and seems to be free of that sort of class consciousness.

In fact, the psychological portrayal of Frances is what helped me stick with this overlong book. A fascinating character to start with, Frances changes with exposure to new information or outlooks, each transformation believable within the story.

The other thing that kept me going was the narrator Juliet Stevenson, one of my favorite actors. Having her voice in my ear is always a pleasure.

Who are your favorite audiobook narrators?

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce

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I enjoyed Miss Benson’s Beetle so much that I went back to look at this, Joyce’s first novel. The recently retired Harold has too much time on his hands. His wife Maureen keeps their home in a small village in southern England immaculate, seemingly angry at Harold though it is not clear why. For Harold “Days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair.”

Then a letter arrives, addressed to him in a shaky scrawl. It is from a former colleague Queenie Hennessy. They had been assigned to work together and had become friends, although they’d had no contact since she had moved away many years ago. She is now in hospice and writing to say goodbye.

Harold struggles to find the right words, but eventually writes a short note to her and sets off down the lane to post it. But he keeps walking, and walking, and eventually realises that he is going to deliver it by hand, walking the 500 miles north to Queenie’s hospice. After talking with a “girl in a garage” who teaches him how to microwave a burger and relates her story of keeping her aunt alive through faith, Harold sends Queenie a note telling her to wait for him.

Even the most analytical person can succumb to magical thinking. Harold comes to believe that he is walking to save Queenie. He is ridiculously unprepared, with no supplies or appropriate clothing, wearing yachting shoes which quickly wear out and give him terrible blisters.

What makes the story work is Joyce’s tone. She doesn’t make fun of Harold or look down on him. She presents each incident as it comes, leaving the reader to decide how we feel about Harold, and about Maureen, who finds that she misses Harold once he has gone. I fretted about Harold’s unworldliness, spending down his retirement as he journeys, not knowing how to care for his feet properly. Yet it is his innocence that draws people to him, almost all displaying the kindness and generosity that coexist with the hatefulness we see in the media.

This isn’t a fairytale. Pain is a constant. Not just the physical pain of walking day after day, but the emotional pain of reliving past mistakes, which is where Harold’s mind goes as he walks: his bleak marriage, the promising son who no longer visits, the self-loathing reinforced not only by their rebuffs but also the early rejection by his parents. And both he and Maureen have some kind of unfinished business with Queenie.

The aspect of novel-writing that I struggle with most is deciding when to reveal information. An author wants to create suspense by withholding information but revealing enough as they go along to reward the reader, as well as dropping clues along the way. Even in non-mysteries, most readers want to puzzle out what’s going on before being told.

Here, I felt the pacing of reveals was off. I don’t want to go into detail for fear of giving away too much. I just felt that the backstage machinery was too obvious in places. It’s good to have this model to set against other books where I found the pacing of reveals to be more organic and more satisfying.

I appreciated the changes Harold goes through during his walk, from his introspective moments to his painful losses of direction. I especially liked his experiences of England’s countryside, villages and towns on foot. I often walk in England for a week or ten days at a time, and have found it a vastly different experience than with any other form of transportation.

There were parts of the book I didn’t find as interesting and was tempted to skip, but I’m glad I took it slowly and persisted to the end. I’m also intrigued by the idea of a modern-day pilgrimage. Quite a few of my friends have been walking the Camino de Santiago. I’m more interested in smaller pilgrimages, at least for now.

If you were to go on a pilgrimage, where would you go and why?

Matrix, by Lauren Groff

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In 1148, Marie de France at 17 has been running her family’s estates since the death of her parents and trying to avoid coming to the attention of Eleanor of Aquitaine, with whom she has a familial connection. When Eleanor does notice her, she declares the tall, sturdy girl with a rural accent too gauche for marriage or life at court, and sends her to England to be prioress of a run-down abbey.

Initially homesick and shocked by the poverty and near-starvation of the nuns, Marie summons the strength of her predecessors: a long line of women warriors and crusaders.

Fine then, she thinks with bitterness. She will stay in this wretched place and make the best of the life given her. She will do all that she can do to exalt herself on this worldly plane. She will make those who cast her out sorry for what they’ve done. One day they will see the majesty she holds within herself and feel awe.

She sets herself to rebuilding the abbey’s prosperity, its fields and sheepfolds, its income-producing business of copying illuminated manuscripts, and its body of nuns. These new sisters—some prickly older women, some giggling girls, some laborers—support her as she finds their hidden talents and sets them to work that best uses their strengths. Later she begins to have visions, which call on her to create an “island of women” protected from men and the corrupt world by a massive labyrinth: Marie hiding once again from a misogynistic world, this time with her sisters.

Fueled by Groff’s energetic prose, the book traces Marie’s entire life at the abbey, her many successes and rare failures. The world of the abbey comes alive, the texture of its life, the cold of early-morning prayers, the taste of a rare treat, the ways of healing. The handful of nuns we get to know are presented as memorable individuals with their own strengths and flaws.

In this fictional Marie, Groff combines two historical characters: Marie de France, a 12th century French poetess who wrote a collection of lais about courtly romance, and Marie d’Anjou, Abbess of Shaftesbury. There is a theory that they might be the same person, but it is unproven. I would have liked to hear more about Marie the poetess, but accept that is not this book.

Here Groff instead gives us a model of a powerful, indomitable woman, canny and visionary, much like Eleanor of Aquitaine but with a Christian moral code. While I love seeing a strong woman succeed, Marie’s accomplishments strain my credulity. Building the maze that protects the abbey like Briar Rose’s castle is one thing, but going on to design and build new machines, roads, dams, and fortifications with military precision?

Where the book started to lose steam for me was when challenge after challenge is met and defeated by Marie immediately. I love her bent for management, her practicality. I love her foresight and the political acumen that leads her to create an international network of spies (often women) and protectors. I appreciate the narrow path she walks between power and pride.

Yet, after a while, the stakes begin to seem very low once we know that Marie’s superpowers will resolve every issue within a few pages. I found it particularly hard to believe that an incipient cult among the young nuns and, later, a revolt about Marie’s going against the church’s teachings would both simply evaporate.

Still, the powerful writing carries the book. As a utopian vision, it reminds me of Groff’s Arcadia which I read recently, about a commune. That book dealt closely with the interpersonal tensions and rivalries that warred with the communal ideals of the families. I expected more of that here, more of the interactions between the sisters, the inevitable conflicts that arise among a group of people living together, but Marie’s iron hand seems to preclude them.

In the end, I’m glad I read this story of a powerful woman. Marie will stay with me for a long time.

Have you read anything by Lauren Groff? What did you think of it?

The Great Alone, by Kristin Hannah

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Thirteen-year-old Leni Allbright is used to her family picking up and moving on the spur of the moment. Now, her father Ernt, having lost yet another job, has decided to move them to Alaska where they will live off the grid on land he has suddenly inherited from his Vietnam War buddy. Leni hopes this will be the new start that will make everything okay and—a great reader—she’s excited to be going to the place Jack London called the Great Alone. Her frail, former hippie mother Cora will follow her husband anywhere.

Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.

Leni knows that her parents have a deep and abiding love for each other, a bond that held up during Ernt’s long absence in Vietnam and through his often violent behavior since his return. The small family has no homesteading skills, other than Ernt’s mechanical aptitude, and as assets only the rundown VW bus Ernt has bought with almost the last of the money.

When they finally arrive at their land, they find a tiny cabin with no electricity or running water, set in a yard full of old animal bones, rusty machinery, and other junk. Ernt’s friend never had a chance to start fixing the place up before leaving for Vietnam where he died.

It’s 1974. Kaneq is barely even a town. Its people, mostly living in far-flung homesteads, are fiercely independent even as they pull together to help each other when needed. And help is often needed in this unforgiving environment. Luckily for the Allbrights, their neighbors, especially the family of Ernt’s buddy, show up to sort out the cabin and get the family started on a garden, chicken coop, woodpile, and other necessities. Winter will be coming all too soon.

And with it, Ernt begins to fall apart, undone by the darkness—eighteen-hour nights—and cold. He becomes increasingly paranoid and jealous of a wealthy neighbor who is attracted to Cora. He drinks too much and prepares for the coming collapse of society by accumulating guns. His abuse accelerates, but Cora and Leni always forgive him and keep his violence a secret. At the small schoolhouse, Leni meets the son of the neighbor—the only other child her age—and they become best friends.

While much of the prose is rich with detail, especially of the landscape, I found the story lacked subtlety. The characters are all stereotypes: the violent and alcoholic Vietnam vet with PTSD, the brainless hippie who thinks love will cure all, the emotionally and physically strong (despite her obesity) Black woman who runs the general store and cares for Leni in ways her parents don’t, a Romeo and Juliet couple. Every character is either all good or all evil.

And the stereotypes are dangerously naïve: you should give up everything for true love; Black mammies exist to save/serve White people; abused women love their partners too much to leave them; all vets are dangerous maniacs. The author even perpetuates the urban myth that people called vets baby-killers when they got back from Vietnam. It’s possible that happened once or twice, but the people I knew protesting the war would never have done that. We cared about the soldiers; we wanted to bring them home, out of danger. The right-wing media played the baby-killer tape for their own purposes the same way they did Benghazi and the Welfare Queen.

This could have been a fascinating story about the tension between being independent—the U.S.’s cowboy myth—and being part of a community. It could have been a thoroughly interesting story about the process of learning about the land, making mistakes, finding ways to survive. Instead we get a story about abuse and crazy preppers. The story entirely skips over the part about adapting to Alaska, jumping from the initial cluelessness to a comfortable existence with all systems humming.

Thus the family’s success seemed unrealistic to me, not just their ability to survive the winters, but also their finances. They have no money, yet Ernt always has cash for whiskey.

Aside from the characters and stereotypes, I found the plot lacking nuance. The first half is fairly slow, which didn’t bother me, but the second half turned into a whirlwind. Writers are told to constantly make it harder for the protagonist, but this story goes too far: disaster piled upon preventable disaster, bad luck and bad choices, misery and pain.

I found there wasn’t much to hold me. The story became more and more sentimental, which actually made it harder to engage emotionally. I didn’t sense the love for Alaska; characters talked about loving Alaska, but that’s not the same thing. The cartoonish characters left me cold; I didn’t ever sense the love between the young couple, much less between Ernt and Cora—their famous love that was supposed to excuse everything, including the damage to their daughter.

The one emotion I did feel was the pain: Cora’s and even more Leni’s. I know there are complicated reasons for staying in abusive relationships, but True Love as an excuse makes me roll my eyes. Self-centered parents who ignore how they are damaging their child make me want to spit. Leni, like Jane Eyre and countless other unloved children finds her refuge in books.

Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.

I wanted to like this book. Stories about people confronting a new and challenging environment interest me, and Alaska as a setting is a plus. I did find the writing engaging enough to keep reading it, though I set it down often. Ultimately, though, I was disappointed. Of course, your mileage may vary, and many reviews praise this novel.

What stories about Alaska have you read?