BOTTOMLAND
By Michelle Hoover
Black Cat/Grove Atlantic
www.michelle-hoover.com
Michelle Hoover, a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, impressed critics in 2010 with her debut novel, “The Quickening,” a drama set in the bleak farmland of the upper Midwest in the early 1900s. In her sophomore effort, “Bottomland,” Hoover has returned to the Midwest to look in particular at the experiences of a German-American family in the years before and after World War I.
The Hess family has been living in rural Iowa for more than 20 years, ever since patriarch Jon Julius emigrated from Germany in the 1890s to buy 150 acres on the prairie. But with the advent of WWI, neighbors began looking on them with suspicion, a feeling that still lingers after the war, as one of the book’s narrators, older sister Nan, relates: “Though we were born in this land and a part of it, still Father and his accent made traitors of us.”
Told partly through Nan’s voice, as well as those of her father and three siblings, “Bottomland” explores the family’s struggle to work their land and live in near-isolation on the windswept plains. They also must come to grips with the disappearance of Nan’s two youngest sisters, Esther and Myrle, from the farm one night.
Have the girls run off to make their way to another farm, or maybe to Chicago or another city? Or have they been abducted? And if so, is it connected to the anti-German animus some in the community still have?
The family’s search for the girls will take them to grimy Chicago factories and boarding houses as well as across the winter plains. “Bottomland” also visits the blasted battlefields of Europe in the memory of Lee, Nan’s brother, who served with the U.S. Army and came back badly shell-shocked from the war.
Eventually, Esther and Myrle get to tell their side of the story, opening new levels of mystery, complexity and, finally, understanding as Hoover “plays a sly hand of revelation, leaving the truth about how and why the girls escaped to emerge late and plangently” (Kirkus Reviews).
Hoover, a writer-in-residence at Brandeis University in Waltham, grew up in Iowa and drew partly on family history to craft “Bottomland.” But The Boston Globe writes that the novel, by exploring the xenophobia and hatred of that era, “has so much contemporary resonance. … As much as ‘Bottomland’ evokes a grim American past with enough mastery to justify comparisons to Willa Cather, it also speaks of our present tense.”
Michelle Hoover will read from “Bottomland” Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley.
LOCAL GIRL SWEPT AWAY
By Ellen Wittlinger
Merit Press
www.ellenwittlinger.com
Novelist Ellen Wittlinger of Haydenville has staked out a niche over the years, writing for young adults — something she was inspired to do after working as a children’s librarian and reading the books on the shelves around her. She published her first YA novel in 1993, and now she’s produced 15 overall, including her latest title.
“Local Girl Swept Away” begins abruptly. Four teenage friends go out onto a rocky breakwater during a raging storm along the tip of Cape Cod. The leader is Lorna, who the others unblinkingly follow, as the book’s narrator, Jackie, confides: “We always did what Lorna wanted us to. We didn’t even think about it anymore — it was just automatic.”
But disaster strikes this time as Lorna vanishes into the ocean, seemingly swept away by the huge waves. Jackie and her two friends — Finn and Lucas — can only stand by helplessly as they watch a white blob, possibly Lorna’s jacket, disappear on the distant waves.
Lorna’s body is not found, and the three friends are left only with grief and unanswered questions, and Jackie must also wrestle with the weight of her growing but unrequited love for Finn, Lorna’s longtime boyfriend. Did Lorna really die — or has she made some crazy bid for freedom? Does one of the boys in their inner circle know more than he’s letting on? As the story unfolds, Jackie will have to find a way to become her own person in the wake of her friend’s loss and the mystery surrounding her.