Starred review from May 10, 2010
Hoover's powerful debut tells the story of the intertwined fortunes of two early 20th-century Midwestern farm women. From the time Enidina Current and her husband, Frank, move into the hardscrabble farmhouse a day's wagon ride away from Enidina's family, their closest neighbors, Jack and Mary Morrow, perplex them, though their proximity and shared farm work often bring the two couples together. Sharing the narrative, stoic Enidina struggles through several miscarriages before finally bearing twins, while the more delicate Mary reels from disappointment, most of all in her volatile husband. Moving through the Depression, the families are driven farther apart from each other, even while Mary's youngest spends most of his time in the Current household, until an accident and a betrayal drive the final wedge into their lives. In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover's characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world.
May 1, 2010
The struggles and embroilments of neighboring farm households in the upper Midwest beginning in the summer of 1913 through the Great Depression, as narrated by the farmers' wives.
From the beginning, Enidina Current, Eddie for short, is wary of Mary Morrow, and for good reason—the misfortunes the Morrows visit on the Currents are nothing short of biblical. Mary plays the piano and seems ill at ease with the hand she's been dealt, hard work on the farm with her boys and her rough and sometimes abusive husband Jack.Mary is religious and plays more than just the piano in the lonesome white chapel their pastor, Borden, built with his father. Eddie's first pregnancy results in a miscarriage—no small blow in a world where children mean the sort of additional labor that can make or break a farm. Somehow, even in this misfortune, there's the taint of blame. Far-flung as these individualistic farming families might be, judgment and gossip run rampant. Eddie's is the story of wrongdoing inflicted by the self-righteous on the innocent, of blame twisted from the doer onto the victim.Despite their initial aloofness, the families forge bonds when Eddie turns to Mary for help pending the birth of twins.The households intertwine when one of the Morrow boys, Kyle, whose sensitivity sets him apart from his ilk, becomes a regular fixture on the Current farm.When the Currents, who cannot abide waste, refuse to go along with the killing of pigs as mandated by a movement for solidarity among the region's farmers desperate to drive prices up, Jack takes matters into his own hands.Bloodshed foreshadows the ultimate penalty Eddie and her family will pay.The tale develops through the narration of both women from later in their lives, elucidating with dramatic irony the warped nature of the judgments and self-justifications of the devout in a community pushed to extremes by the Depression, where some go so far as to call cowardice bravery and to impose their own twisted fears on others.Hoover paints stormy scenes of individuals and communities at odds with one another and with their own dark histories in a vivid, pastoral panorama.
Ultimately, this is the story of survival—how life quickens and is borne on through turmoil, pain and perseverance. At times slow-moving, but imbued throughout with a careful and evenly wrought lyricism.
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Starred review from July 1, 2010
Hoover's engrossing debut novel opens in 1913 on the Upper Midwest plains, an unforgiving landscape for farmers Enidina and Frank Current and their neighbors Mary and Jack Morrow. Through the decades, Mary and Enidina's unique voices, presented alternately, pull us in to their harsh, dismal lives. Enidina, a coarse earth mother with fire-colored hair, tells her story as an old woman in heartfelt letters to an absent grandson so that he will understand her life as it once was and know the kind of people he came from, people who battled prairie fires, failed crops, treacherous neighbors, and the Great Depression. Her friendship with Mary begins badly because she doesn't like Mary's superior airs. In her passages, Mary tells of her own hopes and dreams, her longing for a clean, orderly place and not this farmstead full of mud and the smell of butchered animals. Mary tries to protect her three sons from her brutal husband, and while Jack has a place in the rhythm of the land, Mary finds solace only in the nearby chapel. VERDICTBorrowing from her own family history, Hoover burns away the glamour of the pioneer life, blending history and brilliant storytelling. This standout novel is highly recommended.—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
June 1, 2010
Hoover drew on a 15-page recollection left by her great-grandmother for this novel set in rural Iowa early in the last century. Enidina leaves a life of relative comfort when she marries Frank Current and moves with him to a hardscrabble farm, where they raise hogs, cows, and corn. Her initial loneliness is relieved somewhat when Mary Morrow, her nearest neighbor, pays a call. Marys first words to Enidina are, Hard work, which aptly describes their lives. Although the two women are too different to become close friends, they establish a bond based on their mutual need for female company. Their personal trialsEnidina loses several children, while Marys husband, Jack, is abusiveare set against a backdrop of unrelenting toil, made even more punishing as the country slides into the Great Depression. The novel is related by Enidina and Mary in alternating chapters, but their two voices arent quite distinctive enough to make this narrative device a success. Hoover has succeeded, however, in creating a sense of what life was like for women in that time and place.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)
October 25, 2010
Bernadette Dunne's distinctive gravelly voice, so effective in her recording of The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, unfortunately makes her depiction of Enidina (Eddie), an early 20th-century farm wife, dull and droning. Carrington MacDuffe's Mary, Eddie's closest neighbor, offers us a better sense of Hoover's lyrical prose, and her family scenes are much livelier. Through child birth and death, drought and flood, heat and cold, war and depression, the two women are drawn together first by necessity and later by complex emotional bonds, then forced apart by internecine family and community struggles. An Other Press hardcover (Reviews, May 10).