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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.
"Starred Review. Tender...nuanced, poetic, and evocative. MacArthur empathetically depicts each of her characters in their wounded but hopeful glory." - Publishers Weekly
"Powerful...MacArthur demonstrates a commanding ability to weave meaning from separate narrative threads, exploring how the impact of a person's choices can echo through generations, even as a storm washes the past away." - Booklist
"Soberingly relevant." - Library Journal
"A fecund and contemplative feminist family saga." - Kirkus
"Traveling back and forth in time, Robin MacArthur renders both the Vermont landscape and Vale's family tree with poetic precision and gutting realism. I fell in love with these women and their mountain." - Alexis M. Smith, author of Marrow Island
This information about Heart Spring Mountain was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Robin MacArthur lives and works on the farm where she was born in Vermont. She is the author of Half Wild: Stories (winner of the 2017 PEN/New England Award), the editor of Contemporary Vermont Fiction: An Anthology, and one-half of the indie-folk duo Red Heart the Ticker.
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