FROM THE INTERIOR: BOOK BEGINNINGS/FRIDAY 56 – “THE HOME PLACE”

Welcome to some bookish fun today as we share Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and as we showcase The Friday 56 with Freda’s Voice.

To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists!

If you have been wanting to participate, but haven’t yet tried, now is the time!

What better way to spend a Friday?

 

Today I am spotlighting an ARC from Amazon Vine, from an author I have never read.  But the blurb sold me.  The Home Place, by Carrie La Seur, a debut novel…which would explain why I’ve never read the author!

 

 

 

 

Beginning:  (Chapter One:  Sunday, 2 A.M., Mountain Standard Time

The cold on a January night in Billings, Montana, is personal and spiritual.  It knows your weaknesses.  It communicates with your fears.  If you have a god, this cold pulls a veil between you and your deity.

***

56:  Helen slams down her fork, or tries to.  Her hand is curled awkwardly around the implement, so that her hand bangs the table instead and she must disengage her fingers deliberately, one at a time.

***

Blurb:  Carrie La Seur makes 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.

***

This one sounds like a book that will keep me hooked all the way through.  What are your thoughts?

***