According to what the author says, this is the fictionalized story of her mother’s life. Blinny (for Blanche) is eight years old when her family’s home in Montana with her baby brother inside is burned to the ground. This incident serves as a catalyst for the story, as the rest of the novel is built skillfully over and around it.

The story’s time frame is between 1935 to around 1980s.

In the beginning, Blinny, lacking love and attention from the adults around her, is made responsible not only for the heavy farm work but also for the care of her younger sister. Blinny’s mother is an incapable woman, unhappy, depressed, and without a sense of responsibility. Right after the fire, she dies. Blinny’s luck turns around when her father sends her to be cared for by an uncle she hasn’t ever met. The uncle is good to her and educates her. A few years later, her father shows up to suddenly take her back and makes her live together with a woman he married, a much younger woman who, during Blinny’s childhood, was cruel to her. The plot, then, goes on around Blinny’s hazy and doomed love story and her discovering byzantine family secrets one by one, while succeeding to build her own house brick by brick.

Blinny, as a character, is a heroine, brave, kind, compassionate and in tune with the prairie. Her relationship with her step-mother is an original and complicated one to the end, and it serves as a twist in itself. All the other characters are also well-developed and different from one another with specific quirks. The plot is highly original, complex, and full of mystery, but the story ends satisfactorily.

This novel had everything in it that I look for in a good story: Excellent characterization, great plot with unseen twists, and good storytelling. The story is offered not in chronological order but by switching from present to past and vice versa. Although (I thought) the back-and-forth storytelling was overdone, I could understand the plot quite well.

This is the kind of novel I love to read and I will surely look for other books by this author.

everything.

is Marie F Martin. Her other books are: Ratham Creek, Maternal Harbor.

It is exciting with unexpected twists and the characterization is superb.

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Created Feb 15, 2015 at 1:17pm • Submit your own review...