How it feels to be rescued, heard, and loved (Dayton, Ohio and north/south Oregon, present-day): Tracey Garvis Graves doesn’t just write. She writes for us. To make us feel known. Heard.

From the Girl He Used to Know to the girl she becomes, The Trail of Lost Hearts is a “romantic dramedy” about the woman who wants to reclaim the girl she used to be. “A fairy-tale, beautiful and foreboding.”

From the author of Heard it in a Love Song with its playlist of twenty-eight songs, comes Graves’ newest contemporary novel with a smaller playlist yet well-chosen atmospheric, nostalgic, and sexually inviting songs from the 1970s. Lyrics that foretell what’s in store for two lost souls who meet climbing hiking trails surrounded by the “immeasurable beauty” of the Pacific Northwest’s Oregon: “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” Creedence Clearwater Revival; “Wild Horses,” The Rolling Stones; and “One of These Nights,” by the Eagles.

By Rick Obst [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr

Embracing the popularity of hiking memoirs as a way of healing in the great outdoors, this fictional story revolves around Wren Waters, thirty-four, who stumbles into thirty-six-year-old Marshall Hendricks on the Wild Iris Ridge Loop in Eugene, Oregon. What’s the odds that would happen when she’s from Dayton, Ohio, he from Portland? That over the past five months they’ve both been emotionally hit by unspeakable losses, unbearable pain, and self-blame? “Healing and grieving are not mutually exclusive.”

What’s also the chance they’d both be into “geocaching”? What’s that you might ask if you’re not into the “world’s largest treasure hunt” that uses a GPS to guide the unearthing of a cache – in this case a capsule hidden on an Oregon trail. Marshall isn’t new to this sport and hobby, Wren is. But they’re both “outdoorsy” people. She’d given that up for an indoors man.

One of the novel’s life messages is: Don’t give up things you love. Find a compromise so you don’t lose part of who you are, and what makes you happy. Balanced. How to judge others to prevent that from happening.

Graves knows how to shape her characters. Wren may have lost the life she thought she had in Ohio, but that doesn’t mean she’s lost her competitive streak. She arrives in Oregon having endured a “deep mental funk” that her persistent BFF, Stephanie, always there for her, pushes Wren out from under the bed covers to begin her healing journey to “Take Back Her Life.” It’s Wren, though, who chooses geocaching on the majestic Oregon trails to “find purpose in the middle of nowhere.” So when Wren is the “FTF, first-to-find” a cache on her first trail she’s thrilled. Among the many emotions she hasn’t felt in a long while.

The cache is also a time capsule since everyone who finds it records their name inside to say we were here too. The prose transports us there too.

Wren and Marshall’s occupations suit the circumstances. Wren creates the content and manages social media accounts for clients, so she can work remotely from anyplace in the world, at a time in her life where the place she’s from holds too many painful memories. Marshall is a psychologist, a perfect set-up since “now is not a great time to let anyone into my brain,” Wren tells us. Giving Marshall a PsyD, Doctor of Psychology, the more modern degree, than a PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, emphasizes Marshall’s desire to save people more directly than the research-focused credential. Both are clinicians, but Graves is good at nuance.

What she’s also a pro at is how to use words to stage sexual tension. Here’s a passage depicting that:

“Looks like I won,” Marshall says when he beats Wren to a cache.

“I guess it does,” she says.

“I guess that means I get to choose my prize,” he tantalizes.

“I guess it does,” she replies, noting “the husking sound of surrender in my voice gives the words a certain tone.”

“Ready to pay up,” he asks, “and now it’s his words that carry a certain tone.”

“Depends on the price,” she says.

“It won’t cost you a thing.”

Of course it will. Letting your guard down, opening up, letting yourself be vulnerable does.

Don’t let your mind get too far ahead of wanting Wren and Marshall to come together. A Tracey Garvis Graves trademark is you will feel-so-good-but-first-you-must-go-through Olympic hurdles. Fitting on the steep and slippery trails they climb.

So expect obstacles to stand in the way. Wren tells us she’s wearing a “spiky armor” and could live happily on an all-female island, yet she also confides she’s “touch-starved” for a man. True to her bitter attitude, she ignores the six-foot, muscular, “good-looking” guy who rescues her from two terrifying men with violent intentions soon after she makes that thrilling cache discovery. How long can she sustain that stance? Meanwhile, Marshall acts like it’s nothing anyone wouldn’t do, but he, she, and we know that’s not true.

Graves is a reader of body language, seen when Wren does notice Marshall’s smile – its “guardedness.” The last thing she can deal with is a man hiding something.

The hero suggests they combine efforts. Continue their one-week hiking/geocaching plans hopping around the state together in Marshall’s Jeep. You can imagine how Wren reacts to the idea of a male “traveling companion.” Since he suggested it, what does that say about the guarded man? Who do you think opens up first? Don’t expect that too soon either.

The novel is a travelogue of sorts. Although Wren resists Marshall’s proposal, she relents accepting she needs him to protect her, physically. The two will hike Crater Lake National Park, “one of the clearest lakes in the world,” stopping at the Phantom Ship Overlook, Pumice Castle, Wizard Island, conjuring the fairy-tale part; Tumalo State Park in Bend, where the “Deschutes River runs through the small high-desert city.” Mount Hood, an ancient national forest, volcanic site, and the tallest peak in Oregon with its iconic snow-capped imagery.

Above Crater Lake, by Athleticamps [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Mt. Hood [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

The mention of an island does bring to mind the author’s first novel, On the Island. Except that woman was stranded on an island with a man much younger than her. This time Wren is stranded on an island of her own making, with a man close in age. The two may not be literally stranded, but they share an emotional need to find a way to survive and thrive after what they’ve both gone through. Their raw grief and suffering were triggered by different catastrophes that mentally had a similar effect. Making the point that “healing isn’t always a straightforward and linear process.”

Graves does a service to the stigma of a mental breakdown overcome by tragedy, sadness, anger. Made even more poignant since Marshall is supposed to be an expert on healthy ways to mend one’s psyche. Thus doubling and broadening the novel’s power. This isn’t only a woman’s survival and revival story but a man’s too.

Graves writes as if she’s talking friend-to-friend. One who needs “to be heard,” the other – the reader – who can benefit from what‘s heard.

A story of two kind people learning how to “be kind” to themselves. Will distance make their hearts grow kinder to themselves, when the hiking escape ends? Will Wren and Marshall find a way to get back to each other?

Lorraine

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Discovering what truly nourishes you (Barranquilla, Colombia and Brooklyn, NY; recently and ten years ago, with thirty years of memories): “Caminito was the start and ending of this story” is a telling opening line from The Waves Take You Home.

Which takes you by surprise. Not what you might expect from a contemporary novel set in Colombia: a Latin American country besieged by drug trafficking, crime, violence, impoverishment, and people increasingly risking their lives to cross into our US borders.

Not a novel straight out of the news. A novel straight from the heart of María Alejandra Barrios Vélez, who lived by the Caribbean Sea in northern Colombia. Her hometown Barranquilla, where you’ll discover a restaurant you will not forget, Caminito. A place where lives have been built around, sacrificed for. Where the main character, Violet or Vi, never wanted to leave.

A Caribbean coastal region where the waves come from. Where the title signals the author’s intent to take the reader to a place she knows but we likely don’t. Where a restaurant is at the center of Vi’s life, until she was eighteen. Pushed to migrate to America, not by choice but by emotional anguish, out of respect for and obedience to the strong woman who raised her and owns Caminito: Emilia, her Abuela, Spanish for grandmother. She wanted Vi to have the freedom to choose what she wanted her life to be, rather than tied down to a kitchen Vi was intentionally not allowed in. Her destiny already planned, unbeknownst to her. 

Breaking the cycle of generations of women without choices in one family also meant breaking apart Vi’s young love with the Lebanese son of a butcher who dreamed of becoming a doctor, Rafa. The one who “dreamed harder than anyone” and “held on to the ones he loved.”

Caminito isn’t just a restaurant. It’s an “institution” in the El Prado neighborhood, where a tropical climate fuels more heat to this heart-filled and heart-aching story to save a restaurant. Caminito has a long, colorful history like its once elegant neighborhood, depicting “styles brought by German immigrants, Italians, Syrians, Jews and Lebanese.”

By Jdvillalobos [Public domain]
via Wikimedia Commons

Caminito is connected by a path to Vi’s family’s home, but no one spends much time in it. You’ve probably been to a family restaurant like this one: the proprietor’s young children sitting around one of the tables obediently doing their homework, coloring in notebooks, hearing laughter and loud conversations, relishing the food, like the special recipes created by Emilia – Colombian Spanish dishes and foods from the local cuisines – beloved over its thirty-year history.

Vi and an orphaned boy Anton, whom Emilia took under her wings, wouldn’t be seated together at that table. He’d be in the kitchen learning how to cook alongside Emilia. Vi would be the one at the table, taking in the “rhythm of the restaurant” while coloring. The lyrical prose befitting. 

Unlikely you’d see Vi’s flamboyant Mamá Paula, since she’s barely around, popping in but mostly disappearing. Their relationship has been quite strained, caught up in a bitter pattern of a mother’s criticism. Not that Emilia is touchy-feely either with her tough love approach, but she was always there for Vi, not like her own daughter, the “tropical queen of ice.”

Early chapters fast-forward to Vi at twenty-eight, when she’s graduated from a college in Vermont majoring in art working as a struggling freelance illustrator in NYC, living the past four years with Liam, an architect, in Brooklyn, where Veléz now lives. Gig artists in a city that’s one of the centers of the art world adds another dimension.

Magical realism takes the story to an entirely different realm, after Vi learns her Abuela has passed away and feels she must leave to help Caminito having also learned it’s on the brink of financial disaster.

Emilia hasn’t finished her time on earth. A believer in Colombian folklore, in ghosts, like Latin American writers, among them Gabriel Garcia Márquez, considered a “founding father” of the magical realism genre. Vi is the only one who feels Emilia’s ghostly “cold air” presence, sees and talks with her, since she will not settle down until Vi’s life is settled.

What V encounters takes her “complicated” view of home to another level too. One of the novel’s searing questions is: How do you know where you really belong? A different take on the concept of belongingness – one culture ingrained in her, another she hopes will be.

This story is about far more than saving a restaurant, when the odds are stacked against you. When everyone must step in including the community, yet it’s still not enough. Esprit de corps jumps off the pages. Caminito represents joy, heartbreak, tradition, community, pride, resilience, and conquering “love over fear.” In Vélez’s bona fide hands, it’s deeply passionate, emotional, and awfully romantic.

This kitchen is HOT, with the burdens and conflicts of responsibilities to one’s family. Hotter when you add in the ingredients for competing forces of love – one rooted in the soul, the other newer roots. One more intense, the other easier, safer. Liam wraps Vi in love so the city can feel like home; Rafa will always mean home. If you’re blessed with the love of two good men, how do you decide which one to let go of?

Authenticity also comes from the language of the people. Much discernible or translated, but not all the tempting dishes. Too many to name. Below are images of two, one satisfying the sweet tooth, the other comforting – pastel de gloria and arepas. Food, a deep part of the culture. “Creativity mixed with dignity.”

By MiguelAlanCS [CC BY-SA 4.0]
via Wikimedia Commons
By Mitdralla [CC BY-SA 4.0]
via Wikimedia Commons

One the novel’s mysteries is why Emilia bequeathed Vi the largest share of the restaurant when all she wanted was for her to have nothing to do with it?

Liam says he’ll do anything for Vi, but can he? White and from a wealthy family, can he truly understand what Caminito and Vi’s slice of Colombia mean to her? What it means to be an immigrant in America? Who’s a woman of color? They’re happy in their Brooklyn cocoon, but what happens when the protective shell is broken and Vi returns to Colombia to save Caminito?

How do you decide when to stay or go? El Prado may be “stuck in time,” but should Vi be?

Lorraine

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Finding your voice amid an emotional minefield of female identity issues and racial inequality (New York City, present-day): How far would you go to follow your career dreams? In the increasingly digital world, blurring the real one. In a discriminatory workplace that doesn’t value you? In which DEI initiatives – Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion – have left you out? In your personal space, where you’re also wrestling with your individuality?

Make no mistake about Vanessa Lawrence’s immersive debut novel, Ellipses, as being relevant to all women, young and old, despite its character study of a thirty-two-year-old, queer, Asian-American woman – Lily.

Your job may also not be like hers – writing for a women’s magazine covering fashion, beauty, entertainment – but you know what it’s like to be hardworking, reliable, never complaining about last-minute assignments without seeing any rewards. Feeling undervalued in a job that’s “stalled.” You may also not be knee-deep in the cut-throat fiefdoms of New York City, but you know what it’s like to work in a crazy competitive environment where you’re a team player but the inner circle won’t let you in.

Lily is one of the most conflicted female characters in recent memory. As an Asian-American woman, she’s also the most stereotyped and marginalized minority group. Racial “microaggression” is a word that may be new to those of us who are white. Not for Lily, sharply tuned into what may sound like an inconsequential slight but is far from that.

Googling, you don’t have to look far for evidence. “Discrimination against Asian Americans is rampant but ignored,” reports Axios. Asian-American women are “unfairly overlooked” in the workplace, according to the “largest study of its kind” as of 2021. Victims of being stereotyped as the “Model Minority,” says Vietnamese author Viet Thanh Nguyen. Lily, through Lawrence’s Asian-American lens, has this subtler form of racism spot-on.

Lawrence’s microscope lets us intimately into Lily’s contemplative mind, in a city where “reputations can be a nightmare to maintain” – the seductive opening line. Lawrence has crafted fiction that exposes truths without banging them over your head.

The author also her pulse on her native city that “supposedly never slept, an expectation that requires perpetual exhaustion.” Having spent twenty years writing for women’s magazines (Woman’s Wear Daily, W Magazine), she’s well-versed in the business of “glossies,” and likely had similar assignments as her Lily is tasked with.

Something else, though, is going on in Lily’s “self-actualization” journey. Spanning the spectrum of a female’s unsure sense of self, with all the self-psychological terms that come with it, such as self-identity, self-confidence, “self-effacement,” self-worth, Lily’s world is like ours, growing increasing more complicated and changing.

Lily’s story is about finding her voice in a number of spaces: the workplace, her writing, cyberspace, and in her outside personal relationships. Particularly with a white, privileged woman from Connecticut, Alison, whom she loves, yet struggles with what their future might look like. An example is how Alison fancies herself in suburbia whereas Lily needs the city’s energy. A more glaring point of contention is why Lily won’t move in with Alison? Commitment phobia? Or is something else going on Lily can’t or won’t admit? A shout-out to Lawrence for the tenderness she displays for their lesbian love.

A particularly effective, creative element concocts a digital coach who says she “loves saving other women,” and appears to have what Lily aspires to in the workplace: the power to march to her own beat and make her own decisions. Billie, or “B” to her friends, if she actually has any, is willing to do anything to have gotten to the top and to stay there. Another queer woman, older (fifties), who knows her way around as the titan of a major US cosmetics company. With her “Cheshire-cat smile,” a “diva extraordinaire” that has “all the cattiness such a term insinuated.” Puzzling, then, to Lily, why she’d take any interest in her. Lily is both wary of B and entranced by her.

The two met in person at a charity ball, but the rest of their relationship floats in the digital realm. Whether a stroke of luck or beware what you wish for, their text messaging becomes addictive. Lily senses she should stay away from B, but she can’t get enough of what she expects and wants to learn from her. Who turns away a seasoned mentor? What if her punchy, clipped advice is cryptic? Risky?

B is bewitching, so we see Lily finding herself gripped to her phone, anxiously awaiting those three dots to appear indicating B’s writing to her. Ellipses, what a clever electronic title! The phone devolving into a source of troubling distraction, especially for Alison. Deceptive, sly, controlling messages that do offer actionable measures shy Lily could try to stand up for herself in her workplace, which is in the midst of semi-shifting from print-to-digital format. Does digital versus print publishing reflect on the reputation of a writer? Does it mean she’s valued less? How does that fit Lily’s uphill battle to be taken seriously as a writer by being given “meatier stories”? Is magazine writing true journalism? Questions Lily ponders.

Lest you think the women’s magazine world Lily inhabits is superficial, consider how print newspapers have been gobbled up by the digital age or shut down completely, compared to women’s print magazines apparently holding its own. Though not in the minds of employees, worried about being deemed unnecessary.

If you think the cosmetics industry, part of the larger beauty market, is unimportant, consider it’s valued around $300 billion. Putting aside those astronomic numbers, what does that tell us about female influences and desires? For instance, Gloria Steinem’s groundbreaking Ms. magazine is credited as the driver of the feminist movement.

Interestingly, Cosmopolitan, rated either number #1 or among the top selling women’s print magazines, admitted in 2020 it wasn’t living up to its DEI goals.

Ellipses is entertaining but don’t take it too lightly. Lily may prefer “straightforward” atmospheres, but the novel is a bundle of emotional complexities.

What Lily is after has nothing to do with wealth. She yearns to be respected. To be given opportunities to expand, not held back. Valued as a unique individual with much to contribute, not depersonalized. Having relationships that mesh with her values. Being true to oneself.

Does Lily find her voice?

Lorraine

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What a nearly extinct, mysterious, watery underworld wild animal teaches us (A year in search of otters in Scotland’s West Highlands; Devon, Cornwall, the Lake District, England; and West Wales): The biggest takeaway from this gorgeously written, hybrid memoir’s obsessive quest to discover the hidden world of otters is how it enriches a life, when you’re so fully immersed in the mysteries of the natural world.

You may be thinking otters? Who cares? A member of the Weasel family? Miriam Darlington’s “icon of nature conservation” will, then, take you by surprise as there’s much to learn from these creatures.

Otter Country is the kind of book that defies classification. A memoir woven into an unfamiliar animal tale mixing wildlife biology, ecology, geology, geography, chemistry (water pollution), conservation, restoration, and environmental sciences.

It’s also philosophical and meditative. A self-help book for living in the moment – as long as you’re willing to leave your comfort zone, like Darlington does time and again. Making her escapes into worlds so different than ours. You’ll feel her wanderlust to places you may want to add to your travel bucket list. Places to slow down, listen, sit in silence, daydream.

What’s amazing to a US reader is that even though the North American species of otter – one of thirteen Mustelid types – is seeing its population increasing, how many of us have ever noticed, heard, or thought about otters?

Why aren’t Americans thinking about otters, cherishing them like Darlington depicts the UK does? Otters have captivated the British for decades, leading to their protected status in the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

A remarkable, adorable, heartfelt characteristic of otters is their motherhood journey, in which her pup clings to her underbelly for as long as eighteen months. Signifying how much is needed to learn to survive their “knife edge” existence.

Otter Country is also about the meaning of a place. “Where a place has been home, has caressed our senses in a familiar embrace, carried us with its contours, nurtured us in a mutual and unspoken understanding, how do we deal with its loss?”

Literature and poetry integrated and cited often, add another dimension to the inclusive nature of what you’re reading, learning, sensing, feeling.

Prose-wise, perhaps if Darlington’s nature writing wasn’t as fetching the book wouldn’t be as inviting. What is it about people passionate about wild animals, wild landscapes, wildlife that translates into spirited writing? 

Passion is the key word. Darlington’s lyrical, poetic prose reveals her passion as an award-winning poet and creative writing lecturer at the research-oriented University of Plymouth, England. She lives on the stunning, tempestuous southwestern coast of Devon, England, and has also written an acclaimed nonfiction book on owls adapted into a BBC Radio Book of the Week series.

Otters tell the story of the health of an“entire aquatic ecosystem” from a UK mindset on changing waterways as a “Living Landscape.” In describing a farm two naturalist friends turned into a conservation Trust (one of many referred to), Darlington says that, “it isn’t about people. It’s not about any of us. It’s about what we invest and leave, and what is to come.”

The author describes herself as “fixated” on otters since childhood. An early influence was her grandfather, a famous biologist and geneticist, dubbed “the man who ‘invented’ the chromosome.” His collection of science books fueled her passion for science and literature, along with her mother’s love of poetry. Factors that fed into “the longest love affair of my life”: a British children’s classic, The Ring of Bright Water, about otters and the man who’s credited with saving them from extinction, Maxwell Gladwell.

Written in 1960, it’s Maxwell’s otter book that lets us see the underpinnings of why Otter Country is a must-read for appreciating the vital force of humans bonding with animals.

Maxwell’s isn’t the only author’s otter story discussed, but it looms large and it’s where Darlington’s UK “True North” journey started in Scotland’s northwestern coast, where the long Skye Bridge makes a dramatic sight crossing that connects to an ancient island, the largest of the Hebrides islands.

Maxwell feels larger than life but his raising of otters as pets with tragic deaths raises questions. Darlington visits the stone cottage he lived in that he gave a mystical name to – Camusfearna. She also pays a visit to Jimmy Watt, one of Maxwell’s “otter-keepers,” who lost two fingers from one of these so-called “pets.”

Otters are water creatures. While sea otters are found in sea locks and oceans, most of Darlington’s tales are to remote water areas the Eurasian otter is known to inhabit – rivers, streams, pools, marshes, the “roots, peat and bog” of wetlands – with the occasional spotting of their “musky” dens or holts.

An immensely adaptable animal, “otter’s skills and beauty have been translated into some of the most captivating film, prose, and poetry ever written about a wild creature,” Darlington writes. You’ll be introduced to a good number of literary and visual art mediums.

Armed with intense curiosity, a wealth of knowledge, and preparedness for raw, unpredictable weather conditions, to the extent she can, Darlington explains that the first step is to know what you’re looking for: evidence otters have left their marks, such as droppings or “spraints” on walking paths, and acute listening for an otter’s sounds or calls like “huff” and “yikker.” 

Chapter 1, “Spirit Level,” sets the tone for the otherworldly landscapes and places most of us will never traipse through. Certainly, not with the fervor and daring of the author! On one adventure, for instance, she realizes she’s entered “some of the wildest, most impassable woods I have ever seen.” Mind you she’s venturing alone, wild camping, “sleuthing,” especially at nighttime when there’s the greatest likelihood she’ll spot a rather clever, rapidly-moving, camouflaged predator hiding and disappearing in a flash.

What Darlington doesn’t know she asks, phones, meets, researches: British authors of otter books, like-minded naturalists and preservationist friends, otter experts, and intrepid souls she encounters on her numerous escapades. Welcomed everywhere, showing us how well humans connect through common passions.

Although otters are no longer hunted down for their thick, “double-layered,” valuable fur, land development has torn down their private hideaways; industries have polluted their waters, such as Cornish coal and tin mining; and the larger ocean predators. None, though, as frequently lethal as being hit by a car when dashing across a road.

Darlington’s patience is also inspiring. Willing to “spend a good amount of time finding nothing: then and only then, perhaps an ambiguous sign will turn up.”

A British artist whose passion for painting Cornwall landscapes, Kurt Jackson, reflects Darlington’s overall passion and wide-ranging account.

Maxwell’s fairy-tale invented name for his isolated homeplace is Celtic. “Celtic people, whose spirited life was rooted in stories of transformation, drew their mythology instinctively from the land and its creatures.”

A poetic way of describing Darlington’s quest for “transference” and imagination.

Lorraine

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Titanic obstacles to true love (Glasgow, Scotland, 1878 – 1879; Seattle, Newcastle, San Juan Islands, Washington Territory, 1879 – 1981): How long can you hang on to a promise of love?

In A Wild and Heavenly Place, Robin Oliveira lets us feel the ache of an unlikely love between two people separated by Britain’s social class system: Hailey from the upper-class, and Samuel, the lowest. Each eyed the other from segregated levels in a Glasgow, Scotland church. She sitting higher, he staring up at her.

Herculean barriers – societal, historical, man-made, environmental – thwart two seventeen-year-olds from being together. Their story can make the naysayers believe in instant love, first love.

The central question driving Oliveira’s fourth historical novel is whether Samuel and Hailey ever come together? Can two people navigating the “edges” of two worlds on two continents ever find their way back to each other when people, events, disasters conspire against their love? Can profound love conquer all?

Oliveira goes to great lengths to delve into the truths and emotions of her stories, well-informed by her wide-ranging research, heritage, and life experiences.

The novel is this blog’s fourth review of all four of her creative historical works, in which humanity always shines through her flowing, glowing prose:

  • In Winter Sisters the nurse becomes a physician and activist for marginalized women. Set in Albany, New York, where the author’s from.
  • I Always Loved You is about a conflicted, passionate love between two famous artists, Mary Cassatt and Edward Degas. Set in Paris, a place Oliveira loves. 

All her novels are set in the 19th century.

A Wild and Beautiful Place is about soulful love, as well as a passion for a place of “spellbinding” beauty and wildness – the Pacific Northwest – from an author who lives on Cougar Mountain near Seattle. Near one of the novel’s important historical settings: Newcastle, a pioneering coal mining town people headed for with a gold rush mentality as there was money to be made.

Coal mining and the shipbuilding history fueled by coal in both Glasgow and Seattle are two industries that altered the fates of Samuel and Hailey. Most of the novel takes place journeying to and in Washington Territory before it became a state in 1889, eight years after the novel ends.

The San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound inspired the novel’s title, a summer place the author has the fondest of memories. Referred to as the “Mediterranean of America” in an 1879 news clipping introducing the last chapters of five parts.

Robin Oliveira has a way of telling the most difficult of circumstances in tender, compassionate prose using history to guide the storytelling. In this novel, exploring “the very truth and nature of love.” Or as Samuel said to himself in Glasgow (Part 1), “What a strange thing desire is . . . it teaches you all you need to know”; and also declares to Hailey his boundless love that he’ll go, “Anywhere, anytime, anything. If you need me …” You’ll be amazed and heartened at what that turns out to mean.

A few words about the context of Hailey’s and Samuel’s lives when they enthralled one another in Scotland, where the author’s ancestors hailed from. Hailey’s father, an engineer who owned a coal mine when Glasgow’s coal (and shipbuilding) industries were thriving, on the heels of the Industrial Revolution. When Samuel immediately picked up on how Hailey “radiated happiness.” What he perceived was someone with all the comforts of wealth but not any experience with the downtrodden.

Samuel and his beloved five-year-old sister Alison, clinging to him, are orphans. Hailey has a younger brother, Geordie, also five; he plays a pivotal role in how Samuel meets her parents: a loving father repressing his guilt that it was his mine that blew up, whereas her mother is cold-hearted, uppity, distasteful. Geordie’s role expands dramatically, showing us the depth of sisterly love and devotion, mirroring Samuel’s brotherly love.

Yet their lives have been the polar opposite. Samuel’s intensely focused on finding food to nourish Alison, revealing from the start his selflessness after being subjected to the cruelty of an historic orphanage, Smyllum. When we meet them they’ve escaped the abuse, but living in a different type of inhumane conditions: overcrowded, squalid, disease-spreading tenement housing. Not too far away, shipbuilding alongside the River Clyde is where Samuel earned little monies enduring backbreaking labor shoveling coal to power ships. You’ll feel the poignancy and irony of his filthy, dangerous job while he dreams of building and owning his own ship. For him, the “lines and elegance” of a ship were “G-d’s gift to man so that we could see the wonders of the world.”

John Atkinson Grimshaw [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

What marvelous spirit Samuel has despite the life he’s had! The same spirit witnessed when the story crosses an ocean to Seattle, where most of it is set. A city recently burned down but not deterred. A “collective boosterism” seen in the rebuilding and shaping of a city enveloped by “unspoiled beauty.”

Steamships propel Samuel’s re-making of himself. In assured prose that makes the crafting a “mix of bible and suggestion,” its authenticity forged, in part, from the author making sure she knew “how to drive a boat, read nautical charts, plot routes.” (Excerpted from a conversation with her publisher). Most of the paddlewheel steamers referenced were real ones, like this one:

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The “forgotten history” Oliveira writes about is also seen early on with the historic collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank – “one of the most severe tests of the British banking system … but hardly known.” We see how it indiscriminately impacted families, including Hailey’s. One of many examples of how history penetrates fiction.

The drenching, raw weather in Glasgow and the Pacific Northwest is embodied in larger environmental issues. Especially toxic coal dust and coal waste piles, or “slag heaps,” that are cancerous and under the right conditions explosive.

The discrimination seen in Glasgow between societal classes is also recounted in Seattle’s prejudice towards Blacks and Chinese migrant and immigrant workers. The hypocrisy of double-standards exposed as exceptions were made for those who contributed greatly to Seattle’s growth and industry. An example, Chin Gee Hee, who provided the labor force that built the first railway enabling people to move easily and swiftly to the coal mining towns outside the city – the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad.

Chin Gee Hee
by Asahel Curtis [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons
Seattle, looking east toward Beacon Hill
by Carleton Watkins [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Fictionally, two Black characters – Pruss born a slave and his son John Salvation (perfect name) saved from the shackles – add so much richness, warmth, and friendship to the story. Samuel met them on a steamship shoveling coal headed for Washington Territory. To Hailey.

There’s also the role of Salish indigenous tribes who owned the land that became Seattle. The Duwamish and Suquamish peoples Henry Yesler, a legendary figure in Seattle’s early history, employed, but to tell their full story decades afterwards deserves another historical novel.

There’s never enough of Native American “forgotten history.” Might the author craft it? Once again uncovering and creating moving stories to enlighten and captivate.

Lorraine

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