Loss leads sisters to process traumas
Kate Christensen’s eighth novel, “Welcome Home, Stranger,” is a brief, brilliant story of grief and love.
After her mother dies, 53-year-old environmental journalist Rachel Calloway flies home to Maine to help her sister Celeste sort through their mother’s things and spread her ashes. There are old grudges to mend, traumas to face and a complicated history with an old boyfriend to unravel.
Into this cauldron leaps our wry narrator, arriving home to a sister she deepdown adores but who’s angry she didn’t help out more in the final years of their mother’s life. For her part, Rachel is convinced her mother didn’t want her there. As the sisters snipe, it becomes clear their competitive infighting is a result of their alcoholic mother pitting them against each other when they were kids — which is another trauma they must work through. And then there is also the old boyfriend, a man who is now married to Celeste’s best friend.
But as these fraught histories play out and the cracks in their lives begin to show, the real monster rears its head: At this stage of their lives, the women feel invisible. Celeste’s nearly adult children disdain her, and her husband doesn’t look up from his phone long enough to notice her. Rachel’s former husband is dying of ALS and her 30-year reporting career has ended because an editor fired her.
How Rachel handles this stage of life is subtle and instructive, and it’s why we should have more novels like this, told from this snarky viewpoint. Rachel examines her life, the ups and downs of temperature and mood as a scientist examines the planet, trying to find beauty, trying to be
hopeful.
Her insights are small, even obvious. They’ve been there all along; she just needed to articulate them. And she does, beautifully. — Christine Brunkhorst, Minneapolis Star Tribune
In Ariel Lawhon’s “The Frozen River,”
narrator Martha Ballard reveals how a person would navigate the river that flows through Hallowell, Maine, in the late 18th century: “There are only two ways to cross the Kennebec: by ferry in warmer months, or by foot once it’s frozen.”
When Martha, the town’s midwife and healer, is summoned to examine a body pulled from the water one bitterly cold morning in November 1789, she finds a bruised and battered man who clearly didn’t die from falling through the ice. Martha determines a different cause of death: The victim was beaten and hanged, then thrown in the river. She also confirms his identity — Joshua Burgess, one of two men accused of raping the pastor’s wife, who is Martha’s friend, Rebecca Foster.
The second accused man is the town’s judge, Colonel Joseph North, who fiercely denies the allegations
leveled against him. Martha is convinced the two crimes are connected and hopes North will be suitably punished when he stands trial.
North proves a ruthless adversary, one determined to discredit Martha’s version of events and thwart her progress at every turn. Martha also finds herself up against Benjamin Page, a Harvardeducated doctor who declares Burgess’ death an accidental drowning. But then tongues start wagging and both Rebecca’s husband and Martha’s son are suspected of murder. As North starts to make life difficult for her family, Martha decides to go it alone and do whatever it takes to find justice.
Martha is so vividly rendered that it is hard not to become absorbed in her narrative and emotionally invested in her life. We follow her investigation in a community torn apart by scandal, while also witnessing her children’s budding romances and helping women in need.
Martha’s journal entries flesh out this tough, brave and resourceful woman. Her valiant fight against the evil that men do makes for a winning blend of fact and fiction.