Taos-based author Kate Christensen takes readers on an emotional trip to Maine
You’d think that Rachel’s independence, her brains and her fame as a Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist would foretell a sunny future.
Not so fast. Stuff happens to Rachel, the vulnerable, resilient narrator of “Welcome Home, Stranger,” Kate Christensen’s eighth novel.
Rachel is the stranger in the title. She’s en route from Washington, D.C., to Maine — where she grew up — to help her sister Celeste scatter the ashes of their recently deceased mother Lucie.
Rachel coldly describes herself on Page 2. “I look and feel like exactly what I am — a middle-aged childless, recently orphaned menopausal workaholic journalist.”
And divorced. From a man who decided he was happier gay; though they’re still friends and roommates.
And she’s soon to be jobless. Rachel had been estranged from Lucie for a decade. But she can’t seem to shake the haunting legacy of her mother’s severity and competitiveness.
Lucie bequeaths Rachel her home, which she’s anxious to clean out, fix up and sell. A homeless person, who resembles her late cousin, makes repairs. Then a fire guts the house.
Rachel’s return brings her back in touch with the Calloway and the Gautreau sides of her family, and with Rachel’s old boyfriend David, now married to Molly, Celeste’s best friend and next-door neighbor. Celeste, too quickly, chastises her sister for hooking up again with David.
Celeste quietly suffers from the turmoil in her upper-class life — her husband’s alcoholism and their teenage kids’ ingratitude of their mother’s tireless efforts to maintain domestic stability. Rachel sticks up for her sister, to Celeste’s initial dismay.
The novel has a psychological element that invites readers to understand the behavior of its principal characters.
The state of Maine itself is a warm, embraceable character. Here is Christensen eloquently speaking through her alter ego, Rachel: “Spring in Maine, I remember well, is a season that stretches from the drawn-out end of the icebound, bleak winter to the galvanizing beginning of the brief blue-green-gold summer. It starts out with April, reliably cold and generally dreary, and May is just more of April with incrementally longer and warmer days, trickster month that metes out its transition so slowly, so pinchedly it might as well not be happening at all. In other words, spring in Maine is a nonseason …” Christensen knows Maine. She lived there before moving to Taos two years ago with her second husband, screenwriter Brendan Fitzgerald. “I really feel think Maine is a special place, not at all like New York City with its millions of people,” she said. Christensen had lived in the Big Apple for several decades.
Late in the novel, readers experience through Rachel an existential, unplanned lost-then-found walk in the dark, beautiful forest that is Maine’s Great North Woods.
Christensen is a versatile writer. Besides novels, she’s written two memoirs. Her first detective novel, “The Arizona Triangle,” under an undisclosed pen name, is to be published later this year. And she’s coauthored with Eliza Wolfe a young adult novel, called “The Tarot Sisters,” set in 1848 Cape Cod. It is due out in the fall of 2025.