All That We Carried by Erin Bartels

 

...it was clear that if God was real, he was after her.~from All That We Carried by Erin Bartels

Is life a series of random accidents, or is there a plan? If there is a god, why does God permit evil? Or does this god punish us? Or, lead us to be better? Are people basically self-centered, and therefor evil, and if so, can they change--be saved? And if people can change, can we forgive them?

Sisters Olivia and Melanie have been estranged since the deaths of their parents in a car accident. They were never similar, and their response to the tragedy sent them reeling in different directions. Melanie dropped out of school to settle the estate while Olivia returned to the University of Michigan. When Melanie forgave the man who caused the accident, Olivia was furious and cut her off.

As a lawyer in Lansing, MI, Olivia knows the evil side of humanity. She is controlled, repressed, and a perfectionist. Failure isn't in her vocabulary. When she isn't good at something, she gave it up.

Melanie's blog and YouTube videos turned into a career as a listener and life coach, helping people. Now its time to help herself and bridge the chasm between her sister and herself. She proposes an October hike in the Porcupine Mountains, a natural park in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where bear and cougar still roam, home to the remaining stand of hardwood and hemlock forest between the Rockies and the Appalachians.

Olivia plans the trip in detail; Melanie ignores the advice and is ill prepared. For anything can, and will, happen on the rugged, lonely trails.

Bartels not only references the Michigan landmarks that are the background to the action--she makes them come to life.

Trap Falls

In 2019, my brother and his girlfriend hiked in the Porcupines. They spent a year to prepare, every week hiking longer, harder, with backpacks and food. I knew these sisters were in for trouble from the start! Even Olivia, for all her preparedness, since she already was suffering from hip pain.

Mirror Lake

As the sisters hike the trails, I was able to look at the photographs my brother shared from their hike, shared in this post.

View from Escarpment Trail

Melanie has something she need to tell Olivia, but she needs to tear down the wall between them. The hike doesn't bring them closer. Olivia has shouldered responsibility for them both, her bossy big-sister side dominating. 

Mouth of Big Carp River

Little Carp River

One thing that surprised my brother and his companion was the elevations they had to climb, the rocks and roots. Luckily, they did not suffer any accidents. Unlike Bartel's sisters who end up fleeing a forest fire, resulting in an accident.

Crossing a Stream meant climbing a gorge

All That We Carried has so many wonderful aspects. It's almost a travel guide. It is an adventure story and a family drama. It is a psychological study of the burdens people take upon themselves. 

 

At its heart is the struggle with spiritual matters, the nature of God, the question of evil in the world, the randomness or providential nature of life, universal questions we ask as communities and individuals. 

It is the rare person who can embrace the mystery of life, avoiding anger, despair, or fear.

Overlooked Falls

I loved the Michigan references throughout the book! On the first page, I recognized "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," the towers from the old Lansing electric plant whose blinking lights always told me I was almost home during our nine years in Lansing.

There is overt God-talk, and a mysterious character who shows up providentially. Melanie is challenged over her incorporation of all faiths into her belief system. But the changes in the characters arise out of their shared experience and conversations, their journey not over, but they have set foot on the right trail. 

I agree that this is Bartel's most mature work so far. 

I read and reviewed Bartel's previous novels We Hope for Better Things  and The Words Between Us.

I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing and a galley from NetGalley. (I also pre-purchased a copy of the book.) My review is fair and unbiased.

All That We Carried: A Novel

by Erin Bartels

Pub Date: January 5, 2021 

ISBN: 9780800738365

soft cover $16.99 (USD)

"This subdued tale of learning to forgive is Bartels's best yet."--Publishers Weekly

Ten years ago, sisters Olivia and Melanie Greene were on a backcountry hiking trip when their parents were in a fatal car accident. Over the years, they grew apart, each coping with the loss in her own way. Olivia plunged herself into law school, work, and a materialist view of the world--what you see is what you get, and that's all you get. Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life-coaching business around her cafeteria-style spirituality--a little of this, a little of that, whatever makes you happy.

Now, at Melanie's insistence (and against Olivia's better judgment), they are embarking on a hike in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In this remote wilderness they'll face their deepest fears, question their most dearly held beliefs, and begin to see that perhaps the best way to move forward is the one way they had never considered.

Michigan Notable Book Award winner Erin Bartels draws from personal experience hiking backcountry trails with her sister to bring you a story about the complexities of grief, faith, and sisterhood.

Manido Falls

Manabezho Falls

About the author

ERIN BARTELS is the award-winning author of We Hope for Better Things—a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, winner of the 2020 Star Award from the Women’s Fiction Writers Association in both the debut and general fiction categories, and a 2019 Christy Award finalist—The Words between Us—a 2020 Christy Award finalist—and All That We Carried (coming January 2021). Her short story “This Elegant Ruin” was a finalist in The Saturday Evening Post 2014 Great American Fiction Contest. Her poems have been published by The Lyric and The East Lansing Poetry Attack. A member of the Capital City Writers Association and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, she is former features editor of WFWA’s Write On! magazine and current director of the annual WFWA Writers Retreat in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Erin lives in the beautiful, water-defined state of Michigan where she is never more than a ninety minute drive from one of the Great Lakes or six miles from an inland lake, river, or stream. She grew up in the Bay City area waiting for freighters and sailboats at drawbridges and watching the best 4th of July fireworks displays in the nation. She spent her college and young married years in Grand Rapids feeling decidedly not-Dutch. She currently lives with her husband and son in Lansing, nestled somewhere between angry protesters on the Capitol lawn and couch-burning frat boys at Michigan State University. And yet, she claims it is really quite peaceful.

Visit the author's website at https://erinbartels.com/

Greenstone Falls

A Covid-19 Christmas

All month, we had no lasting snow, just lots of green grass...

...but then it did snow for Christmas!

This week, we delivered packages to our son and his girlfriend, meeting in their back yard, masked. Sunny and Ellie are always thrilled to see us. My brother stopped by and delivered presents. We visited, masked. He has social distanced, and his workplace monitors the 180 employees not working remotely, requiring masks and social distancing.

It's just me and my husband for Christmas Day.

My husband gifted me A Promised Land by Barack Obama and Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson.

I surprised my husband with a tea set purchased from a Twitter friend who is an author and a potter. 

My brother's gifts included a What Would RBG Do? mug.

For our last book club of the year we read The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. Next month we read The Wicked Sister by Michigan author Karen Dionne and she will Zoom with us!

Book mail included We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels, a Michigan author. I read the galley before it came out. I was glad to win a finished copy form A Novel Bee Facebook group. I just read the galley for Bartel's new book coming out next month, All That We Carried, plus I had ordered the finished copy with a signed bookplate and it came in.

Other book mail included Better Luck Next Time by Julia Claiborne Johnson, a LibraryThing win. My review is coming next month, too.

I requested two Amazon Vine books to review. A young reader book on disabled role models, I Am Not A Label,

And Machine Embroidered Art.

My son and his girlfriend sent us lovely cookies a few weeks ago, and more this week. They are too pretty to eat! (But we did, with Simpson & Vail tea that they sent us!) We will finish the cookies off today, and use the tea set for the tea.

My husband's brother and his wife sent us lovely Michigan cherry edibles.

Two new NetGalley titles are on my shelf:

• Eleanor in the Village:  Eleanor Roosevelt's Search for Freedom and Identity in New York's Greenwich Village by Jan Jarboe Russell 
• Poems to Night by Rainier Maria Rilke, the first translation and publication of a group of poems presented to Rilke's friend Rudolph Kassner

Here is my obligatory grand-pup pics. Sunny snuggled down, one of my quilts in the background.

And, Sunny sharing her dinner with Gus (who does not share with Sunny!) Ellie eats on the other side of the fence so Sunny doesn't steal her food, too! We don't know how Sunny stays so skinny!

With vaccines being distributed to our essential workers, perhaps this pandemic will begin to be contained. And perhaps this summer will find 'life as normal' again. 

Or at least, some semblance of normal. I have the luxury of staying in and staying safe. I have my books and my quilting. Our son and his girlfriend work safely from home. 

But for hundreds of thousands, 'normal' will never come again. Loss of loved ones, loss of income, economic hardships--some things will not go away. We donated hundreds to food banks in the last month. But it doesn't feel like doing enough.

Stay safe out there. Have a safe holiday season, however you celebrate it. 

Questions Answered with 2020 Books Read

Quite a few years ago on Facebook I happened upon a meme that I have enjoyed sharing every year.

Answer these questions with the titles of books read in 2020:

Describe Yourself: The Wicked Sister

Describe Where You Currently Live: The Mission House...but Once Upon a Time I lived on Mars

If you could go anywhere, where would go? Miracle Country. Or, at least Hoboken near The Long Bright River. 

Your best friend is: Other People’s Pets.

You and your friends are: The Dearly Beloved: Pelosi, Eleanor, Nora, Jack, JFK, and Sergeant Salinger.

What’s the Weather Like: Angry Weather

Favorite time of day: The Darkest Evening

What is life to you: Hieroglyphics

Your fear: What The Eyes Don’t See—The Violence Inside Us. The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing.

What is the best advice you have to give: Superman’s Not Coming. 

                                               

Thought for the day: Shelter in Place

                                           

How I would like to die: in My Bed

My soul’s present condition: knowing I am one of The Fortunate Ones

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

My library book club's choice this month was Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, a novel that had been sitting on my TBR shelf for some time. I was happy to finally read it, especially as I had read and reviewed her second novel, To The Bright Edge of the World through NetGalley.

It turns out that The Snow Child interrupted Ivey's writing of that novel. She caught a story and couldn't let it go.

I had heard so much positive buzz about this book! Then, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature!

The book clubbers all enjoyed reading The Snow Child, one saying she didn't expect to like it but was 'hooked'. Several enjoyed it, but thought it would be a 'one time read.' Another labeled the novel as a 'historical romance fantasy.'

The readers loved the descriptive writing of the Alaskan landscape, one saying nature itself became a character in the book. A reader was impressed by the realistic exploration of childlessness and the challenges of marriage.

Of course, there was great debate over the tension between realism and fantasy in the novel, the question of the nature of Faina, the 'Snow Child' who appears out of the snow and is adopted by the childless, middle-aged homesteaders, Mabel and Jack. Is she real? Is she a magical being? Is she human? We wondered about Faina's killing of a swan and her use of the feathers on her wedding dress. Was she the swan? Was the swan her burgeoning sexuality or attachment to the wild and free life? 

Faina is at home in the wild where she is free and independent. Jack and Mabel lure her into their lives, but she disappears over the summers. She seems trapped between two worlds. When her need for companionship results in circumstances that will keep her from her wild and free world, she fails.

We talked about this being a feminist novel. The childless homesteader wife Mabel had lost her her one baby. She thought that by leaving the East for Alaska, she and her husband would be equal partners. It takes her husband's incapacitation to allow her to become a full partner. 

Mabel begins in isolation, alienated from her back-home sister and family, and alone in Alaska. When the neighboring family barge into her life with their good-natured willingness to help out and socialize, being in community literally is a life saver. The neighboring wife wears men's pants and displaying a competent, almost joyous, attitude in her ability to wrest success from the inhospitable wilderness. We talked about the importance of community in the book and during this pandemic when everyone is isolated at home.

Later, I realized we had not even touched on the homesteader husband, Jack. At first, he tried to protect Mabel from the hard work he endured, not asking for her help resulting in alienating her. He follows Faina and discovers her secret home and history. It is Jack who protects Faina's companion fox and later fiercely defends her innocence.

There is hardship and sorrow, personal growth and joy, realism and magic to be found in these pages.

The Snow Child was a lovely book club selection. 

The Snow Child
by Eowyn Ivey 
Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown and Company

from the publisher

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them. (

History Mini-Reviews: You Never Forget Your First and Caste

These two books on American history seem to have little in common. 

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson is a history of American society based on a caste system that dehumanizes and devalues African Americans. 

You Never Forget Your First demythologizes George Washington. Both offer new ways of interpreting America, past and present.

Alexis Coe's entertaining biography of George Washington, You Never Forget Your First encompasses a wide consideration of the man. One of the most sobering considerations looked at the enslaved people he owned, including a reading of the slave schedule. The reader is fanatic. A good first biography due to its entertaining nature, sure to appeal to younger people and those who don't usually delve into biographies. I borrowed an audiobook through the local library.

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
by Alexis Coe

Brittany Pressley (Narrator)
ISBN: 139781984842527

from the publisher

As the first woman historian to solely write an adult biography on Washington in more than a hundred years, Alexis Coe combines rigorous research and lively storytelling that will have readers--including those who thought presidential biographies were just for dads--inhaling each page.

In You Never Forget Your First, Washington's wild ambition is encouraged by his single mother and solidified by Martha Washington, the young, wealthy widow he marries. After the Revolutionary War, Washington is unanimously elected to the presidency, twice, and readers finally understand why his more educated, wealthy, and outwardly hungry Founding Fathers knew he was the only man for a seemingly impossible job. Washington loved to dance, offered unsolicited romantic advice, lost more battles than he won, and was almost felled by a life-threatening disease and a backstabbing cabinet. But he emerged successful, establishing values that ensured the survival of the United States of America to this day. Yet presidential biographers have always presented him in the same, stale way.

In a genre overdue for a shake-up, Coe highlights juicy details and skillfully differentiates between the legend and the man--and confirms she's a historian to be reckoned with

*****

Wilkerson argues that American racism has all the hallmarks of Hindi caste. She lays out her argument logically and illustrated with a multitude of examples from history, American slavery and Nazi Germany and the Hindi caste system. 

It’s heart-wrenching stuff. I am sick and disgusted by our history and current conduct as a society and as a political system. I have had to put this away for a bit. Brilliant, horrifying.

I purchased an ebook.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson

Random House 
Published August 4, 2020  
ISBN: 0593230256 (ISBN13: 9780593230251)

from the publisher

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Like millions of others, I watched the 1981 Great Performances television series of Brideshead Revisited--several times--and read the paperback published at that time.

Little, Brown and Company has reissued a 75th anniversary edition of the novel and I used this as an excuse to revisit Waugh's book.

I loved the nostalgia and longing regret for lost places and relationships. But the novel is not just a romance, or the story of a young man's first love and glimpse into another world. 

The story opens during WWII in England. A disillusioned, thirty-nine-year-old Capt. Ryder and his platoon have been moved to a new location, which he recognizes as the home of his college friend. 

I had been here before; I knew all about it, Ryder thinks about Brideshead. The book goes on to tell the events of twenty years ago.

Book I, Et in Arcadia Ego, begins with a flashback to Ryder's first view of Brideshead in the company of his Oxford friend Sebastian Flyte, who became Charles's first love. It is never quite clear the nature of that love. At Oxford, Charles notices Sebastian for his 'arresting' beauty and his eccentricities, including carrying a teddy-bear. "Sebastian takes Charles into his circle of friends, indulging in high-spirited (and drunken) adventures. One friend warns Charles about the Flyte family, including that Sebastian's parents live apart, but his mother's faith does not allow for divorce.

Charles's mother is dead and his father is self-involved and distant. Sebastian takes Charles to Brideshead to meet Nanny Hawkins, who still lives in the nursery, then Charles away before his family arrives, warning, "I am not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They're all so madly charming. All my life they've been taking things away from me."

Their second year at college, they become mutually exclusive in their friendship, but by the end of the year, their relationship comes to a break and they go their separate ways, Charles to art school against his father's wishes, while Sebastian's alcoholism brings a schism between him and his family. 

Charles rejection of the Brideshead's Catholicism also plays a part in the break. He is agnostic with a Protestant background. The Catholic faith is pure superstition to him. Sebastian's mother is devout, but is separated from her agnostic husband who lives abroad with a mistress. The elder Brideshead son wishes for a calling. The youngest daughter has faith, but not daughter Julia. Julia tells Charles that Sebastian has a calling, but flees from it.

Charles becomes an artist specializing in architecture and marries. Years later he and Sebastian's sister Julia fall in love and have an affair. They are waiting for their divorces to come through when the Brideshead patriarch returns to die in the family home. 

The family bickers over whether to bring a priest to their father's death bed; his death-bed conversion leads Julia to give up Charles for God. 

The last scene finds Charles in the Brideshead chapel, the eternal flame of faith burning, saying an ancient prayer.

Waugh wrote that "the whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that theologians won't recognize it," and "the book is about God." Waugh even considered changing the title to "A Household of Faith." 

Before he left for Oxford, Charles was given advice, including to avoid Anglo-Catholics, "they're all sodomites." Charles struggles to understand the Flyte's Catholic faith. "Sebastian's faith was an enigma to me at that time," Charles says, adding "I had no religion." Although he had gone to church as a child, and "the masters who taught me Divinity told me that biblical texts were highly untrustworthy. They never suggested I should try to pray." He thinks about his devout mother died as a nurse volunteer during the war and recognizes he did inherit "some such spirit." "I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real."

He recounts a conversation with Sebastian who affirmed his simple faith and awareness of being "much wickeder." Charles is baffled. "...if you can believe all that and you don't want to be good, where's the difficulty about your religion?" he asks. 

Sebastian also recounts his family's "mixed" attitude toward faith, noting "happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with it, and that's all I want." But his pursuit of happiness makes him miserable. He takes up an unworthy, needy soul to care for, as if in penance, or perhaps longing for love or companionship. In the end, he finds a home with monks who forgive him his alcoholism. 

Julia's sudden change, the awareness that her faith does not recognize her divorce, ends any chance for happiness for Charles or herself. In his misery, somehow faith also comes to Charles.

It is a beautifully written last scene, Charles in the room that was built to be the Brideshead chapel, the lamp still burning above the altar. What the chapel and the flame represented had outlasted the human tragedies of time and history,something eternal that Charles could turn to. He is rejuvenated just by being there and reciting "a prayer, an ancient, newly-learned form of words."

The moving and hopeful ending, Captain Ryder experiencing the sacred, is satisfying and uplifting. 

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
by Evelyn Waugh
Little, Brown & Co
paperback 
ISBN0316242101 (ISBN13: 9780316242103)

from the publisher

The gorgeous 75th-anniversary edition of Brideshead Revisited, the novel selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best of the century.  

The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece—a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.

Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.