The Home Place
Carrie La Seur made her remarkable debut with The Home Place, a mesmerizing, emotionally evocative, and atmospheric literary novel in the vein of The House Girl and A Land More Kind Than Home, in which a successful lawyer is pulled back into her troubled family's life in rural Montana in the wake of her sister's death.
The only Terrebonne who made it out, Alma thought she was done with Montana, with its bleak winters and stifling ways. But an unexpected call from the local police takes the successful lawyer back to her provincial hometown and pulls her into the family trouble she thought she'd left far behind: Her lying, party-loving sister, Vicky, is dead. Alma is told that a very drunk Vicky had wandered away from a party and died of exposure after a night in the brutal cold. But when Alma returns home to bury Vicky and see to her orphaned niece, she discovers that the death may not have been an accident.
The Home Place is a story of secrets that will not lie still, human bonds that will not break, and crippling memories that will not be silenced. It is a story of rural towns and runaways, of tensions corporate and racial, of childhood trauma and adolescent betrayal, and of the guilt that even forgiveness cannot ease. Most of all, this is a story of the place we carry in us always: home.
MY REVIEW: Author Carrie La Seur's debut work, "The Home Place", is an atmospheric, involving tale of a woman's involuntary return to her past. Attorney Alma Terrebonne has created a tightly-scheduled, neatly-ordered life for herself with a successful career in Seattle. With everything in its proper place, she can immerse herself in her work, pushing herself hard enough to keep haunting memories of her Montana youth at bay. A phone call changes all that when she is informed that her troubled younger sister, Vicky, has been found dead from exposure after a fall and a serious head wound. Flooded by regrets and guilt over her broken relationship with her sister, Alma heads back home to bring order to the chaos Vicky has left behind, and that includes finding a suitable place for Vicky's daughter, Brittany. As Alma reconnects with family and friends, and the home place itself, she begins to sense that her sister's death may not have been an accident. Caught between two worlds, Alma's heart is further confused by her feelings for Chance Murphy--the first love who never really let go. Drawn by the inescapable lure of the land and the legacy of her family's history, Alma must choose where her future lies. Can she let go of her life in Seattle and make a life in Montana, the very place from which she has run for so many years? Can she embrace her heritage as a Terrebonne and truly find peace at the home place?
Book Copy Gratis Amazon Vine
Reviews
Carrie La Seur
Carrie La Seur’s critically acclaimed debut novel The Home Place (William Morrow 2014) won the High Plains Book Award, was short-listed for the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel, and was an IndieNext pick, a Library Journal pick, one of the Great Falls Tribune’s Top 10 Montana Books for 2014, and a Florida SunSentinel Best Crime Fiction pick for 2014. Carrie has completed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Summer Session and the 2019 Tin House Novel Writing Workshop, and was a Susannah McCorkle Scholar at the 2016 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her writing appears in such diverse media as Daily Beast; Eyes on the International Criminal Court; Grist; the Guardian; Harvard Law and Policy Review; High Country News; Huffington Post; Iowa Farmer Today; Kenyon Review Online; Mother Jones; and Yale Journal of International Law. New poetry, a book review, and short fiction appeared recently in Inscape, Kenyon Review, Rappahannock Review, and more.
In 2017, La Seur published two short stories in anthologies. The first, “Bad Blood”, tells of unsettled business between white and Northern Cheyenne Montanans in Montana Noir. The second, “Colt the Bull-Riding Hasid”, is the story of an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who was born to be a cowboy, published in Sandstone, local writing in support of This House of Books, the Billings (MT) Bookstore Cooperative, of which La Seur is a co-founder. On 2018, William Morrow released La Seur’s second novel The Weight of An Infinite Sky, a family drama set in southern Montana and loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a finalist for the Reading the West award from the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association.
Carrie’s résumé includes a degree in English and French magna cum laude from Bryn Mawr College, a Rhodes Scholarship, a doctorate in modern languages from Oxford University, and a Yale law degree. She has always been a writer. “The writing comes easily,” she says. “It’s what I’m always doing in the background, whatever else is going on. It’s my resting pulse rate to be scribbling what’s happening in my head. If I didn’t, I’d be wandering the streets talking to myself. Sometimes I do that anyway.”
In 2006, Carrie founded the legal nonprofit Plains Justice, which provides public interest energy and environmental legal services in the northern plains states and played a key role in halting several new coal plants, enacting clean energy reforms, and launching the Keystone XL pipeline campaign. “I’m still involved in Plains Justice, but I went back to private practice in 2012. Running a nonprofit takes a unique blend of selflessness and enough raging narcissism to think you really can change the world. The burnout rate is similar to that of telemarketers.”
Carrie lives in Montana, where her ancestors settled in 1864 and she hikes, skis, and fishes with her family.
http://carrielaseur.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment