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A Good High Place
Lynn Kimball Fay (Author)
9780875806358
Paperback / softback, published 21 May 2010
250 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.454 kg
Incredibly timely, despite the fact that much of it was set almost a hundred years ago. Filled with complex characters living in a changing world. This is a book for people for whom the act of reading a novel is an all-encompassing pastime. What will charm the reader most about Kimball is the compassion she has for her characters' weaknesses. Ortega y Gassett says, "Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.' The place itself—northern Michigan—bursts alive in L.E. Kimball's wonderful debut novel, as do these unforgettable characters who inhabit its spirit and magic and grace. And the story is so beautifully told that I read it in a single sitting, and then began reading it again. With poetry and spirit Kimball's words are like magic, moving fluently through time, multiple voices, and histories. Elk Rapids, Michigan, is so intricately rendered it becomes another unforgettable character in this poignant tale about the wages of friendship, loss, and the heart in search of its rightful home. A thoroughly engaging novel and a luminous debut. If novels were bodies of water, A Good High Place would be a clear, rapid river running through the primeval forest of northern Michigan, revealing to its readers pools and eddies, places inhabited by love, loss, remembrance, and the ever elusive trout. L. E. Kimball's story is written with grace and ease as it explores what was and, hopefully, what will always be true about our at once forbidding and generous American landscape.
Epic and nonlinear in nature, A Good High Place chronicles the lives of two women—Luella and Kachina—who, like the orbit of the sun and the moon, both attract and repel each other. Luella's suspicion that her younger sister—who supposedly died at birth—is being raised as the sister of Kachina sets her on a path of self-discovery that generates more questions than answers. The Native American Kachina is an enigma, a person with a special healing touch who, it is rumored, never ages, leaves no footprints, and might never die. Her goal is to help her people, the Anishinaabek, remain on the Red Path and resist being absorbed by white culture. To do this, she takes guidance from what she refers to as The Day, guidance Luella assumes can be "nothing less than the murmured confidences of God pouring from the sky." Ultimately, Kachina and Luella find friendship among the conflicts of culture, duty, and even loving the same man. Set during the years prior to World War I in Elk Rapids, Michigan, A Good High Place addresses familial struggles and those of a nation moving inexorably toward the age of the automobile. The sometimes painful adaptations of a faster-paced age are embodied, in part, in the struggles of Luella's father who, already troubled by the death of his wife, wrestles with the realization that his livelihood as a steamboat captain is becoming obsolete.