Cue the devastation for Georgia, who flees up the coast in wedding garb after spying the seemingly happy family walk by during her final dress fitting. He’s a devastating British architect, of course-rom-coms breed such fellows on a Burberry island somewhere-and his long-ago fling with an equally devastating movie star resulted in a 4-year-old daughter he's just learned about.
Dave, a seasoned writer of literary romance ( The First Husband, 2011, etc.), explores this divide through the eyes of Georgia Ford, a 30-year-old LA–based corporate lawyer on the cusp of marrying her dream guy, Ben. In the navel-gazing microcosm of California, worlds don’t get much more different than Los Angeles and Sonoma: the former rich in artificial vice, the latter in cultivated flavor. But when she tries to escape home to wine country, she discovers nearly as many fissures in her family. Beautifully written, however, and Hegland's knowledge of organic gardening, fruit drying, etc., is impeccably authentic.ĭays before her wedding, Georgia’s relationship breaks down. They've learned nature's lessons and, purified, are prepared for humankind's great destiny: to live in the woods like animals. Fearful of more such violence, the sisters burn down their father's house and take up housekeeping in a mammoth redwood stump. Mystically, they both produce milk to nurse Eva's son, the product of a rape by a passing thug. A boy comes to take Nell away, but she cannot leave Eva though sisters by birth, Hegland turns the girls into lovers-and ideologically pure lovers, at that. Slowly, because the alternative is starvation, Nell learns the wisdom of the forest: killing a wild sow with a rifle she barely knows how to fire, using herbs for medicines and tea, gathering acorns to pound into flour. In the best scene, the father's chain saw kicks back and cuts him, and his daughters are helpless, unable to do more than watch as he bleeds to death.
The mother dies the father pushes his dreamy daughters to learn such humble skills as gardening and canning. There's a war somewhere, and ever more virulent strains of viruses rage through the population then, suddenly, there's no more food available in stores, no more gasoline, no more television. She places a wife, a husband, and their two daughters, Eva and Nell, on 50 acres of second-growth redwood forest in northern California-the idea seeming to be that since the location is remote to begin with, news of the outside world would filter in slowly. Hegland is vague about civilization's downfall. Brisk, feminist, contemplative first novel about the end of contemporary civilization and the survival of two sisters.
0 kommentar(er)
