They carried sandwiches, coffee, and cookies into the field for morning lunch at half-nine.
Esther, who was twenty that year, and her sister Constance, sixteen, rose at five-thirty, lit the stove, collected the eggs, and served breakfast. “They worked from half-six in the morning until six in the evening. The vivid descriptions of farm life in northern Minnesota alone leave no room for grand illusions about a return to simplicity. This is not another contemporary romance novel set in the world of turn-of-the-century rural America (thank God). It is through finely honed metaphors like this, and slow, deliberate scenes that take the time to show us minute details, that a complete picture of the life and struggles of the protagonists emerges. She watched her fingers form the loops and snug the knots, the diamond pattern slowly widening,” (p. Hitching was finer work, each knot like a decision you made that cinched into place and added a pattern you see only gradually, looking back over the lay of it. A little wear takes off the prickles and you get a soft rein that lies easy on a horse. In a particularly moving passage in the point of view of Essie, Brown writes, “What she had once thought to find in marriage was nonetheless true in the matter of horsehair rope. The book’s real subject, however, is the negotiation of attachment, obligation, and love between men and women.
The book ostensibly concerns the Alaskan Gold Rush of 1900, and a woman named Essie Crummey, who finds a place for herself in a mining company after fleeing a bad marriage. Brown’s new novel The Fugitive Wife (Norton, 2006).
What is ultimately the more perilous journey – the one across harsh, cold and unknown land, or the one in which the delicacies of feeling must be carefully traversed, with no destination in mind or in sight? This was the primary question that came to mind after I finished Peter C.
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