A review of Evergreen, a novel rich in character & place.

The way Eveline would remember it, there was a moment of absolute stillness when the future was still theirs before the wind blew up from the river and the first of spring’s leaves shook as if they were afraid.
~from EVERGREEN by Rebecca Rasmussen

I have loved Rebecca Rasmussen’s writing since her first novel, The Bird SistersLandscape plays an important role in the story of two sisters, Milly and Twiss, who “have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health;” readers become rooted in place and character easily from the first few pages. Rasmussen’s second novel, Evergreen (released in paperback in June), is just as rich, if not more, in setting. The opening paragraph tells all:

19027_10155757242600296_7662015040815369733_nEveline LeMay came after the water. She arrived on a cool morning in early September, asleep in a rowboat without paddles as if she knew the river currents would carry her past the tamarack and black-spruce forest, around Bone Island, a fen, and a bog, all the way to Evergreen and her new husband, Emil, who was waiting for her on the rocky shore.

A young woman ferried into new territory under the shadows of a spiny northern wood and past an island whose name alone hints at desperation, Evergreen opens with the reunion of Eveline and her husband Emil, who has been carefully transforming a broken-down and abandoned cabin into a newlyweds’ safehold.

But Eveline is not safe. When Emil returns overseas to his ailing father, she falls victim to a stranger’s hand and finds herself caught in the turbulence of a backwoods spring, a secret child, and a decision that tears her apart. The companionship of her strange neighbor Lulu helps her survive the harsh living and a broken heart, and later, on her deathbed, she reveals the truth of her secret to her son, Hux: a baby, his sister, given away but never forgotten.

Evergreen is a quiet novel in which landscape not only paints the picture but sets the tone of this generational story about a young wife and mother, about the broken soul of a daughter, and about a brother’s love, devotion, and healing. Rebecca Rasmussen is an author to follow if you’re a reader and one to emulate if you’re a writer.

Click HERE for more about Evergreen, including an excerpt, reviews, and a reading guide.

 

Books Lining Up in the Queue

I cleared my plate of a few writing obligations recently. I keep talking about “that novel,” and my son thinks it’s time I deliver. He has high hopes that, when this book sells big, I will buy him a Hummer.

IMG_1094I tried to explain the reality of publishing, like first I have to finish the book and then I have to secure an agent who woos an editor who convinces a publisher who puts it on the shelf and we all cross our fingers and by that time maybe he’d be a lawyer and he could buy me a Hummer. Or, at least a new pair of boots.

Still, he would not be swayed. And, between him and my daughter, who drew her version of the book’s cover–eyes to the right–along with an encouraging note, I realized there’s no more messing around. I cleared my plate so I could get busy with revisions.

And, for the most part, I have.

I’ve spent more nights a week with the draft in the last two months than I did all last summer. Even if I don’t have big jumps in word count to show for it, this draft is expanding. Maturing.

What else is expanding is my TBR list of books (you thought I’d say waistline…that’s a post for another day).

Reading fuels the writing in one way or another, through creativity or inspiration or even good old fashioned mojo passed on from one author to another through the pages of a book. I’m excited to dig into five soon-to-be-released books by some of my favorite authors.

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THE MOON SISTERS by Therese Walsh
March 4, 2014

(from Amazon) This mesmerizing coming-of-age novel, with its sheen of near-magical realism, is a moving tale of family and the power of stories.

Read an excerpt from the book HERE. Take her Moon Sisters Personality Quiz to learn more about the characters. Then, stop back by the blog on March 26th for a Q&A with Therese that includes a book giveaway.

41SKzKiGmBL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_ONCE I WAS COOL by Megan Stielstra
May 13, 2014

(from Amazon) With storytelling chops honed over a decade of performances at Chicago’s 2nd Story storytelling series, these insightful, compassionate, gutsy, and heartbreaking personal essays explore the messy, maddening beauty of adulthood with wit, intelligence, and biting humor, tackling topics ranging from beating postpartum depression through stalking to a surprising run-in with an old lover at the symphony while on ecstasy.

You can hear Megan read one of her essays in this podcast interview with Willy Nast and Karen Shimmin on All Write Already. I dare you to listen and NOT pre-order her book.

51i+Ha3CFmL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_CHASING THE SUN by Natalia Sylvester
May 20, 2014

(from her website) Andres suspects his wife has left him—again. Then he learns that the unthinkable has happened: she’s been kidnapped. Set in Lima, Peru, in a time of civil and political unrest, this evocative page-turner is a perfect marriage of domestic drama and suspense.

I love reading about Natalia’s road to publication on The Debutante Ball. She recently posted about first lines in novels and how much they change from the seed of an idea to final draft. She also blogs about life and writing on her website. Read this post, Found Letters From My Past Self. Put this book on your list, too.


EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng

June 26, 2014

Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng

(from her website) Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . .
So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. . . . Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

I’d like June to come early, and not just because the weather’s been mean around here. Celeste Ng is another of my favorite authors whose work online I have loved and bookmarked more than once. She’s a contributor on Fiction Writers Review and has an essay out in the Glimmer Train Bulletin this month, where she talks about how her experience as a teacher guided her decision to tell the story through an omniscient narrator. Word on the street is she’s presenting at the Muse & Marketplace Conference in May. I wish I lived closer to Boston.


EVERGREEN by Rebecca Rasmussen

July 15, 2014

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(From her website) It is 1938 when Eveline, a young bride, follows her husband into the wilderness of Minnesota. Though their cabin is run-down, 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, Evergreen is a luminous novel of love, regret, and hope.

I read Rebecca’s debut novel, THE BIRD SISTERS, set in Spring Green, Wisconsin. She writes with a keen eye on setting: place is as important a character as the protagonist. I can’t wait to discover what unfolds in EVERGREEN’s “vanishing forest.”

What’s lining up on your reading radar? Or, should I ask how your revisions are coming along?

Welcome Jenna Blum, Bestselling Author of The Stormchasers

Go get him, Karena, he said. You’re the only one who can.

And Karena knew this to be true, from the nights she was the only one who could sing Charles to sleep, the only one who could coax him off the roof, keep him from climbing the water tower, make him stop chanting that song, stop bouncing that ball, stop kicking that door. She ran out into the lot, tasting the dirt in the air, positioning herself…where Charles would either have to stop or run her down….
~ from The Stormchasers

More than once, I’ve fallen victim to the belief that I could save someone: a friend in despair, a parent on the brink, a loved one chasing a false god down a dark road. I’ve set my voice on an uncomfortable high note in hopes that enthusiasm was contagious, played counselor during marathon phone calls,  stood in the way of the inevitable and gotten pinched in the middle. Painful lessons are never pretty.

But in Jenna Blum’s amazing novel, The Stormchasers, we find a story that mixes the agony of mental illness with the beauty of landscape, the power of devotion, and the miracle of unexpected healing. A novel as much about mental illness as it is about storms, The Stormchasers gives readers vivid images of how both phenomena mirror each other in the way danger brews and crescendos, then crashes and leaves a path of destruction.

The main character, Karena Jorge, is driven in her work as a journalist and in her search to save her twin brother, Charles, from himself. She sets out on a stormchasing expedition, one that puts her in danger at times and brings her closer to a different discovery: Charles is not the only one who needs saving.

The Stormchasers, touching and poignant, is a story that I will read again. I’m so honored to host Jenna Blum today for an interview about her novel, about writing, and about karma. At the end of the interview, leave a quick comment to be entered into the drawing for a copy of The Stormchasers. Random.org will choose the winner on Tuesday, August 30th, at high noon.

**UPDATE: Because of Irene’s visit to the East Coast, and subsequent power outages over the weekend, I’m going to postpone the drawing for a copy of Jenna Blum’s novel until Thursday, Sept. 1st.**

CC: In a recent and compelling essay on the website, Style Substance Soul, you talk about a childhood fascination with tornadoes and reasons why you chase storms (even after the novel has been published). Did the idea for THE STORMCHASERS stem from your personal experience on the road with Tempest Tours, or was it your research with them that took root and sealed your strong connection with the chasing community?

JB: That’s a great question! I had the idea for THE STORMCHASERS–a novel about a bipolar young man who chases tornadoes when he’s manic and his twin sister, who basically chases him–long before I started chasing storms with Tempest. In fact, I wrote an abbreviated draft of the novel in my graduate MA program at Boston University, back in 1996.  I didn’t have a stormchasing community before I started chasing with Tempest to research subsequent drafts of the novel, and what I didn’t expect were the lifelong friends I would make chasing.  I chase with the same people every year, my esteemed mentors and friends like me who are still learning, and they are my storm family. THE STORMCHASERS continues to introduce me to new folks in the chasing community, for which I’m profoundly grateful.

CC: All of the characters in your novel are written in such a way – authentic and relatable – that readers will think of them long after they close the cover of your book. Do you have a special technique you use, early on in your writing, for developing characters?

JB: Thank you for the generous comment about my characters!  I suppose they come off as real because to me, they are real.  They just happen to exist in a dimension halfway between the ether and the paper, hovering somewhere above my head.  My first job as a writer is to get them out where others can come to know and love them the same way I do.  I’ve been told that my characters are lovable despite their flaws–or sometimes hateful because of them or sometimes just plain flawed–and I take that as proof I’ve succeeded in getting them down as real people.  Because who among us isn’t flawed?

When I’m first getting to know the characters, I start by writing down everything I know about them, which ranges from macro big-picture stuff–basic family history–to the fact that Charles Hallingdahl, for instance, the brother in THE STORMCHASERS, ate only green food as a child. Not all the details make it into the novels.  But because they’re part of the character, I write them down.  More details reveal themselves as I go along, and the biggest struggle is to remain true to the characters’ characters, to not graft behaviors onto them because it suits the plot or it’s something I myself would do.

CC: In your career, you’ve traveled all over and seen a variety of landscape. Do you have a favorite place that you’d love to call home or visit time and again?

JB: Again, a great question, and one that strikes a poignant chord with me these days, because although I’m proud to say I have a home in Boston and a house in rural Minnesota where my mom and grandmother were born, I’ve been on the road at least 300 of 365 days in the past year.  One night, when I was checking into a hotel in Florida, the desk clerk looked at my MA license and said, “Wow, you’re far from home.” I thought: Yes, I sure am, both literally and metaphorically. I’ve traveled and divided my geography so much that I’m not sure where my central home is.  But I love my writing community and friends in Boston.  And geographically, my heart belongs to the heartland.  The landscape of the Midwest and the High Plains makes sense to me and allows me to breathe freely–all that space and big sky.

CC: What are you reading these days?

JB: Galleys!  I have the privilege of reading books before they’re published to supply authors with quotes for their book jackets (you’re like Ah-ha, *that’s* where those come from). It’s a great kind of sneak preview.  I read Rebecca Rasmussen’s incredible debut THE BIRD SISTERS and Kaira Rouda’s inspiring novel HERE, HOME, HOPE.  Three novels I highly, highly recommend for 2012:  Anna Solomon’s THE LITTLE BRIDE, about a Jewish mail-order bride who ends up in the Dakotas.  Nichole Bernier’s THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D., about a woman discovering her best friend’s secret life after that friend’s death.  And Jami Attenberg’s THE MIDDLESTEINS, which is about food, family, love, life, and loss–all the important stuff–and will tell you why it’s vitally important to include cinnamon in pastry.

CC: What advice do you have for writers on the rise?

JB: Usually I would cite Winston Churchill here:  “Never give in, never give in, never give in.” And that’s still true. But in today’s swiftly changing publishing landscape, it’s also important to be open to new ways of doing things. There’s no room for a lazy writer these days (if there ever was!).  Expect to do your own legwork, your own homework, your own promotion.  Use social media. Reach out to and support as many other writers as you can.  It’s good karma, and that must always come back to help you in the end.

Thanks, Jenna. And, for all you readers out there, don’t forget to drop your name in the comment section for a chance to win a copy of The Stormchasers.

JENNA BLUM is the New York Times and # 1 international bestselling author of THOSE WHO SAVE US and THE STORMCHASERS.  She is also one of Oprah’s Top Thirty Women Writers. For more information about Jenna Blum and her bestselling novels, visit her website, follow her on Twitter, or Like her page on Facebook.