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It is 1960 when Thomas Deracotte and his pregnant wife, Helen, abandon a guaranteed future in upper-crust Connecticut and take off for a utopian adventure in the Idaho wilderness. They buy a farm sight unseen and find the buildings collapsed, the fields in ruins. But they have a tent, a river full of fish, and fields overgrown with edible berries and dandelion greens: they can survive happily until the house is rebuilt. Thomas discovers he isn’t a natural farmer, but there’s a local boy, Manny—a sweet soul of eighteen without a family of his own—who agrees to manage the fields in exchange for room and board. Their optimism and desire carry them again and again.
Until: the traumatizing circumstances surrounding the birth of their daughter, Elise, test them in ways they could never have anticipated. And soon, in the aftermath of a tragic accident to which only Manny bears witness, suspicion, anger, and regret come to haunt the already shattered family. It is a legacy that Elise will inherit, will struggle with, and, against all odds, will ultimately overcome.
"Starred Review. Barnes's descriptions of the rugged landscape are vivid, and the characters' sadness and desires are revealed with wrenching detail." - Publishers Weekly.
"Starred Review. Covering 17 years, Barnes's spellbinding story details personal tragedy and failed Sixties idealism but ends with the hope of a new generation. Highly recommended." - Library Journal.
"[M]any readers will be exasperated by the too-neat parallels and overly literary insights. Resonant with themes of longing and loss, but too self-conscious for its own good." - Kirkus Reviews.
This information about A Country Called Home 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.
Scott M. Barrie
Among other works, Kim Barnes is the author of Finding Caruso, A Country Called Home and two memoirs, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country - a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize - and Hungry for the World. She is co-editor with Mary Clearman Blew of Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, and with Claire Davis of Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, MORE magazine, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.
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