Heart Spring Mountain
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
