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 secretIt’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 … 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.
more
“What does hope feel like in the body? Cool air moving through. An electric charge.”
I want to meet this author, sit down in a small cafe in a small town over a steaming cup of tea, and just talk…MacArthur poured her whole heart and soul into this debut novel, and you can feel it on every page. While I loved the setting (rural Vermont during different decades), what captured me most were the intimate exchanges she so deftly creates between her characters. Spoken and unspoken, physical, allegorical, mystical, sexual.
Underneath this is the violence of the earth breaking apart in floods and other natural disasters due to global warming. And the treatment and bias toward indigenous peoples. It’s not an easy book to read, but an important one.
Vale, one of many female characters, but the main one, at one point calls out:
‘ “Find me!” Guttural. Loud. She has spent her entire adult life learning how to be alone.” ‘
This is the undercurrent of the family saga. These hardy women are battered, broken, unique, but somehow rise above, each trying so hard to find any form of love, and to be found. “You get used to recognizing the impermanence of the ground, the trees, the walls, your own skin.”
There are deep secrets in these woods. And triumphs and failures. Heart Spring Mountain is a microcosm of the larger world around us.
I had a bit of trouble at the beginning with the quick change in pov. But eventually I figured out who was who (sign of my age? suggest keeping a little list of characters), and slowly grew to love each one and to marvel at how the puzzle pieces gradually fit together. You don’t unpeel this onion, its layers fold into itself to create a greater whole.
Fantastic look into the back woods and mountain regions of souther Vermont!
Addiction and dire family failures. I could not get past a few pages. The pandemic is overwhelming enough.
Loved the realistic believable characters. Great insight to rural living in the Appalachian mountains.
Beautiful book. Will stay with me for a long time. I read it on my I-pad and now I will buy a hard copy for my library.
Not for me. Not one character I either liked or cared about. Did not want to waste time finishing it
It took me awhile to get all the characters straight, but once I did I really enjoyed the book. Very interesting and absorbing.
I picked this book up because I had recently had a conversation about how most of the country did not recognize the damage done in Vermont by Hurricane Irene. I kept reading because the characters were interesting and real. This story and people were not made ‘pretty’, but rather seem like people who really live on a mountain, like people I would know, who live poor, but have land. Well worth reading.
Not for the faint of heart. I had to chart all the characters in order to make sense of the plot. It’s rich in nature detail, but very slow in revealing the relationships among all the characters. I’m plugging through it by skipping some of the descriptions of building fires and drinking coffee.