This Bright River
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From a writer and producer of HBO's acclaimed apocalyptic drama series The Leftovers comes a compelling story of young love and old secrets.
Ben Hanson's aimless life has bottomed out after a series of bad decisions, but an unexpected offer from his father draws him home to Wisconsin. There, he finds his family fractured, still reeling from his cousin's mysterious death a decade earlier.
Lauren Sheehan abandoned her career in medicine after a series of violent events abroad. Now she's back in the safest place she knows -- the same small Wisconsin town where she and Ben grew up -- hiding from a world that has only brought her heartache.
As Lauren cautiously expands her horizons and Ben tries to unravel his family's dark secrets, their paths intersect. Could each be exactly what the other needs?
A compelling family drama and a surprising love story, This Bright River is the work of a natural storyteller, one whose dark humor and piercing intelligence provide constant, lasting delights.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ambitious, stylish second novel from Somerville (after The Cradle) is set in the fictitious small town of St. Helens, Wis., and along the Bright River in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Ben Hanson, 32, is back home after his release from a white-collar, "pansy" prison near Portland, Ore., where he served a 14-month sentence for arson. Recovering from heroin and alcohol addiction, he reconciles with his affluent parents and older sister, Haley, and reconnects with a high school friend, Lauren Sheehan, a troubled divorc e and doctor recently returned to St. Helens. The emotionally damaged pair fall in love; Ben tries to solve his cousin Wayne's mysterious death at the family cabin in Michigan; and Lauren fends off Dr. Will Besco, her wildly possessive ex, who has recently remarried. The ample use of backstory paints Will as an abusive husband, and Wayne as an impulsive addict, both things complicating the quests being undertaken together by Ben and Lauren. Things escalate to a violent climax, and a somewhat rambling wrapup finally reveals all the Hanson family's dark secrets.
Customer Reviews
This bright river
Three different narrators, three distinct voices, tell a story of families frozen by unexplained violence in the past.
The two main characters have lost functionality, and their narratives seem incoherent, circling back to separate events in their pasts, events which are somehow connected with the relations between "civilized" colonizers/NGOs and indigenous peoples, and the thoughtless, almost unconscious cruelty often found in the contact. Two monologues, one from a college student to his cousin about the classic de la Casas description of conquistadors' actions in the West Indies, the other narrated by a murderous psychotic, propel the plot towards a climax which seems like the end of the story. Seems.