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Carrie La Seur makes her remarkable debut with The Home Place, a mesmerizing, emotionally evocative, and atmospheric literary novel in the vein of The House Girl and A Land More Kind Than Home, in which a successful lawyer is pulled back into her troubled family's life in rural Montana in the wake of her sister's death.
The only Terrebonne who made it out, Alma thought she was done with Montana, with its bleak winters and stifling ways. But an unexpected call from the local police takes the successful lawyer back to her provincial hometown and pulls her into the family trouble she thought she'd left far behind: Her lying, party-loving sister, Vicky, is dead. Alma is told that a very drunk Vicky had wandered away from a party and died of exposure after a night in the brutal cold. But when Alma returns home to bury Vicky and see to her orphaned niece, she discovers that the death may not have been an accident.
The Home Place is a story of secrets that will not lie still, human bonds that will not break, and crippling memories that will not be silenced. It is a story of rural towns and runaways, of tensions corporate and racial, of childhood trauma and adolescent betrayal, and of the guilt that even forgiveness cannot ease. Most of all, this is a story of the place we carry in us always: home.
Author Carrie La Seur's debut work, "The Home Place", is an atmospheric, involving tale of a woman's involuntary return to her past. Attorney Alma Terrebonne has created a tightly-scheduled, neatly-ordered life for herself with a successful career in Seattle. With everything in its proper place, she can immerse herself in her work, pushing herself hard enough to keep haunting memories of her Montana youth at bay. A phone call changes all that when she is informed that her troubled younger sister, Vicky, has been found dead from exposure after a fall and a serious head wound. Flooded by regrets and guilt over her broken relationship with her sister, Alma heads back home to bring order to the chaos Vicky has left behind, and that includes finding a suitable place for Vicky's daughter, Brittany. As Alma reconnects with family and friends, and the home place itself, she begins to sense that her sister's death may not have been an accident. Caught between two worlds, Alma's heart is further confused by her feelings for Chance Murphy--the first love who never really let go. Drawn by the inescapable lure of the land and the legacy of her family's history, Alma must choose where her future lies. Can she let go of her life in Seattle and make a life in Montana, the very place from which she has run for so many years? Can she embrace her heritage as a Terrebonne and truly find peace at the home place?
Loved so much of this book - wanted more! Wanted to know the backstory of Ray, the policeman; wanted to know more about the life of Pete (things that were only hinted at), and also about Chance's life. Carrie - write a pre-quel! ( )
Alma Terrebone thinks she's escaped a hardscrabble upbringing in Montana. She's a high-powered corporate lawyer in Seattle, with a live-in French-Canadian boyfriend and an imminent merger deal that should give her the inside track to a partnership in her firm. But when she gets a phone call saying her younger sister Vicky was found dead on the streets of their hometown, she is unwillingly drawn back into the family she tried so hard to leave behind.
This is an interesting story that walks the edge of being a mystery, except the characters and their relationships with each other and the land that surrounds them is so much more compelling that I found myself not really caring about the whodunit. La Seur's descriptions of Montana are vivid, but it's Alma's musings on how the "home place" — the ranch where her grandaprents lived during her childhood — seeped almost unnoticed into her soul that really resonated. In the end, she knows she'll have to choose between Seattle and Montana, and she has trouble accepting that Montana and her messy family dynamic have more of a hold on her than she thought.
All the stories, all the history, everything she knows about every point on the landscape envelops her, and the only word that can express anything about what this place is to her is texture — like running her hands over a variegated rock face or smooth birch bark, embedding them in dough, palming handfuls of red clay mud, sinking her feet into the pebbles in the creek bed, lifting a slick live trout with both hands, lying on the rocky earth, rubbing her horse's sweaty neck. Her body is part of the texture, made of this land and the good, sweet water, healed by the herbs, raised on the stories, grown on the plants and animals, quickened by the air. Her body knows textures here that her mind can't hold consciously all at once.( )
The author weaves an exacting and challenging plot, with surprise switchbacks, as the main character tries to solve the increasing mystery of her sister's death and life.
The rural Montana she creates is one that Ivan Doig would have appreciated.
Most of the characters stay true, but readers may well miss Jean-Marc wit, wish that Chance had found a Second True Love, and maybe that Alma and Officer Ray Curtis had sent up some new sparks.
I won this print in a giveaway hosted by Goodreads and I enjoyed every page as I shred tears and empathized with Alma. How do you return to the place you thought you'd never see again to bury your younger sister and be responsible for her daughter when you knew if you hadn't left town to make a new life for yourself in a new town that was more forgiving than small town Montana where the cold ate at your soul it would have been you instead? ( )
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Our native land charms us with inexpressible sweetness, and never,never allows us to forget that we belong to it. [Lat.,Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine captos Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui.]
Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto (I,3,35)
Dedica
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For Esther and Jennie, keepers of the home place
Incipit
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SUNDAY, 2 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME
The cold on a January night in Billings, Montana, is personal and spiritual.
Citazioni
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In this cold, you understand at last that you are not brave at all.
It hangs on her like an unkempt garment, ready to cast off soon enough as age and fatigue shred its fibers.
She's been staying there with a fat, alcoholic Pole named Garfield Kozinsky, after the Montana county where he was born. He's not her boyfriend, she tells people, but she sleeps with him and he doesn't ask for rent.
This part of town has been the wrong side of the tracks since they went in, spanning North America back in the 1880s, when Frederick Billings the railroad man came blustering across the northern plains with a load of cash and dreams. The cash has long since dried up, and who would have a dream around here? Who would be that stupid? The ones with dreams have left, abandoning the others to their cryogenic stasis. It's a neighborhood of vacant lots, chain-link fences, and wide, dented siding, where broken-down cars sit like ships run aground in this ancient inland sea. The oil and coal money lubricating the rest of town only makes the dry rasp of need more pronounced. The derelict shopfronts out on Minnesota Avenue reflect the ashes of prosperity in dirty, cracked windows and urine-soaked doorways.
They say the cold keeps out the riffraff, but it may just keep them out of sight.
Ka-hay. Sho'o Daa' Chi, Alma thinks, the greeting all she remembers of the language that floats unseen through the city like water in the irrigation ditches, dust underfoot, ever present, barely acknowledged.
"Who found the body?" Alma follows up, her lawyer's instincts kicking in. She wants to interrogate Curtis, find out everything he knows, get to the detail that proves that this is all a mistake.
She hadn't expected a police interrogation about her most recent abandonment of her sister. The picture is coming into focus: Brittany alone in the police station, the family dithering as they do until chaos reigns.
Arguing with Maddie Terrebonne's gentle suggestions is generally about as fruitful as cultivating a cactus garden in Seattle.
The crack of the rifle ricocheted over the water like thunder after a close strike of lightning.
Maddie lived more than fifty years on the home place. Coming back to it lights and expands her like a hot air balloon taking shape.
Like her voluble tongue, her eyes never rest.
Maddie looks around 360 degrees, owl-like, and pulls her purse closer.
Alma remembers her mother volunteering for the Domestic Violence Crisis Center, shepherding wives and children to a safe house, digging new belongings for them out of trash bags of donations, how quietly the manless families bore it all, as if relishing the peace.
It was the sort of paradise that people move through unconsciously before they understand that what you love can whiffle away like a dandelion bloom, beyond your reach in the length of a breath.
Chance, as always, sets off to display his land and animals with a quick step and a voice like a kid reading his Christmas list.
He took machines apart and put them back together the way a child plays with blocks, moving the parts through his fingers without looking, learning them, testing their secrets as he carried on a spirited debate about whether or not Hoosiers was the greatest movie ever.
"It's always death that changes things in my family, isn't it?"
Alma inhales warm, grassy horse breath and wonders if love doesn't die of time and distance, but of little daily slights and brutalities, the sort of thing that has never passed between her and Chance.
How little men understand about women. She needs to know about Hilary, but she'd like to meet her about as much as she'd like to put her tongue on the pump handle.
She's grateful to Hilary for taking over the top spot on Jayne's list of people to push off a ledge, but that's it.
"I didn't go looking for anything." Alma's voice is so quiet now that she's not sure he'll hear her, and not sure she wants him to. "I just went."
The horses jog along, breathing steam like dragons.
In the middle distance, a black crater covers several square miles of the ranchland Alma remembers. Machinery moves across it so visibly at this great distance that it must be Brobdingnagian up close. Great clouds of black dust rise and float on a northwest wind, dark portents over spoil piles extending south along the valley in knobby, regular hills. Haul roads trace the land like new, dirty veins. The creek and trees that used to traverse the valley are entirely gone.
Chance holds the horses' heads and they observe frmo his shoulders like a pair of nosy aunties.
If Alma was unsteady before, now she's legless.
They had a million things to talk about and only a few days left together, so naturally, they never spoke.
Lying on the floor those late August nights with cicadas and crickets crying on the other side of the screens, Alma played with the zipper of her sleeping bag and felt sure that once she left, she would never be able to come back. Everything that made Billings her home had taken wing in the silent flight of rubber on ice.
This should teach her not to get involved in other people's arguments, she thinks, then remembers that interfering in other people's disputes is her chosen profession.
Chance's voice is still soft, but the weight of emotion in it is planetary.
Her words get smaller as she goes, like they're disappearing down a drain.
Her voice is shockingly loud against the winter quiet of the tall pine forest.
Facts would help, if there are any, but just when she thinks she has a handle on one, it runs like watercolor and changes into something less reliable.
Her passive nature made room for the tortured past he carried. They fit together like jagged, deformed puzzle pieces.
But something pitiless is working in Alma, maybe Vicky's ghost at her shoulder.
Ultime parole
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Alma lifts her her chin and faces into the wind, and the wind smells inexpressibly sweet.
Carrie La Seur makes her remarkable debut with The Home Place, a mesmerizing, emotionally evocative, and atmospheric literary novel in the vein of The House Girl and A Land More Kind Than Home, in which a successful lawyer is pulled back into her troubled family's life in rural Montana in the wake of her sister's death.
The only Terrebonne who made it out, Alma thought she was done with Montana, with its bleak winters and stifling ways. But an unexpected call from the local police takes the successful lawyer back to her provincial hometown and pulls her into the family trouble she thought she'd left far behind: Her lying, party-loving sister, Vicky, is dead. Alma is told that a very drunk Vicky had wandered away from a party and died of exposure after a night in the brutal cold. But when Alma returns home to bury Vicky and see to her orphaned niece, she discovers that the death may not have been an accident.
The Home Place is a story of secrets that will not lie still, human bonds that will not break, and crippling memories that will not be silenced. It is a story of rural towns and runaways, of tensions corporate and racial, of childhood trauma and adolescent betrayal, and of the guilt that even forgiveness cannot ease. Most of all, this is a story of the place we carry in us always: home.
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