Review: The Home Place by Carrie La Seur

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 874 KB
• Print Length: 435 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0062326457
• Publisher: William Morrow (July 29 2014)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers CA
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00GG08J0G

Book Description

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.

“Powerfully evocative and page-turning.” (Rosamund Lupton, New York Times-bestselling author of SISTER and AFTERWARDS)

“Once this novel is cracked open it’ll pull you in and dare you to come up for air...THE HOME PLACE is a lot of things: a mystery, a crime drama, a family saga, and - most importantly - a very, very good book.” (Wiley Cash, New York Times-bestselling author of This Dark Road to Mercy) 

About the Author

Carrie La Seur is a seventh generation descendant of homesteaders who came to Montana in 1864 and settled in what is now called the Gallatin Valley, near the headwaters of the Missouri River. “My frontier heritage has always been a taproot and a source of resolve. If they could do it, so can I.”
After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, Carrie was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and earned a doctorate in modern languages from Oxford University. “After Oxford, I tried academia for a while and did a summer course at the Iowa Writers Workshop. The literary and academic worlds did not fall at my feet, so I packed up and headed to Yale Law School. The law was a way to get back to Montana and do work I care about. In the process, I gained a perspective and a voice that made my writing stronger and more relevant.”

In 2006, she founded the legal nonprofit Plains Justice, which provides public interest energy and environmental legal services in the northern plains states. Carrie and Plains Justice have played a key role in halting several new coal plants, enacting clean energy reforms, and launching the Keystone XL pipeline campaign.

Carrie currently practices law on behalf of farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans, and does a little writing, from an office in Billings, Montana. A licensed private pilot, she hikes, skis, and fishes the Montana wilderness with her family in her spare time. Her work has appeared in such diverse media as Grist, Harvard Law and Policy Review, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and Salon.


http://carrielaseur.com/bio/

 
My Review

I don't think I'll ever be able to look at Billings, Montana the same way again. Until now, Billings has been one of those cities we ride through, where we usually stop for lunch, on our way home. Now I have a new respect for the town and the people that founded it. And the people who have stayed. And those who came back.

The Home Place is a really enjoyable read. I had a hard time putting it down! It is a bit of a mystery and a bit of a love story. It is a story about strong people and about people standing up for what they believe in.  The Home Place is a story about complicated family relationships. It is a story about how where we live shapes who we become. 

This is a good story. It is well written. I enjoyed all the characters in The Home Place and could relate to them. I definitely recommend The Home Place.