Evergreen
A novel
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4.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the celebrated author of The Bird Sisters, a gorgeously rendered and emotionally charged novel that spans generations, telling the story of two siblings, raised apart, attempting to share a life.
It is 1938 when Eveline, a young bride, follows her husband into the wilderness of Minnesota. Though their cabin is rundown, they have a river full of fish, a garden out back, and a new baby boy named Hux. But when Emil leaves to take care of his sick father, the unthinkable happens: a stranger arrives, and Eveline becomes pregnant. She gives the child away, and while Hux grows up hunting and fishing in the woods with his parents, his sister, Naamah, is raised an orphan. Years later, haunted by the knowledge of this forsaken girl, Hux decides to find his sister and bring her home to the cabin. But Naamah, even wilder than the wilderness that surrounds them, may make it impossible for Hux to ever tame her, to ever make up for all that she, and they, have lost. Set before a backdrop of vanishing forest, this is a luminous novel of love, regret, and hope.
This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evergreen is a small pocket of habitable forestland in rural Minnesota, where, in 1938, giddy newlyweds Eveline and Emil start a life together. Their riverside cabin is stubbornly removed from the nearest town of Yellow Falls, with its electricity and grocery stores. Soon a baby is on the way, and their marriage unfolds, almost too sweetly. But Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters) has a knack for destabilizing her characters as soon as she's got them settled. Emil heads home to his native Germany, and his father's deathbed, with World War II on the horizon. Eveline, nursing an infant, refuses to stay with her parents but, instead, emulates Lulu, her neighbor across the river, who hunts, curses, and stomps around in a dusty coat of animal pelts. Eveline learns empowering survival skills, but they do little to protect her from a stranger who appears one night and rapes her, leaving her pregnant. Mothers, daughters, and granddaughters struggle with abandonment, physical violation, and illness in this story. Rasmussen does not shy away from evil characters rapists, child abusers but her most unnerving character is Eveline's son, Hux. Without an ill-intentioned bone in his body, he makes the women look comparatively unhinged and, at times, selfish. Evergreen is serene, but not safe. If Rasmussen's characters contained such subtleties and contradictions, the novel would be more realistic. And yet, Rasumssen makes her point about the indelibility of trauma and the impossibility of avoiding heartbreak.
