Just Jennifer

The Home Place by Carrie La Seur (William Morrow, July 2014)

Alma Terrebonne is the only one of her siblings who left their hometown of Billings, Montana but as she quickly learns, you can never really escape your family, nor they you.  Alma is practicing law in a successful firm in Seattle, about to make partner, when she gets a call that her sister Vicky is dead and her eleven-year-old niece Brittany is staying with her great-aunt and uncle until permanent arrangements can be made for her.  Alma, who has been estranged with her sister for several years, does not hesitate in taking the next flight out, identifying and claiming her sister, making preparations for a funeral.  When Alma arrives in Billings she hesitates to accept the claim that her sister’s death was accidental, due to being drunk or high, falling outside in the bitter cold, hitting her head and freezing.  The more time Alma spends in her hometown, the less provincial it seems and the less real her life in Seattle feels, making her reassess her choices, making her feel responsible for the siblings that survived the car crash that killed their parents when Alma was a teenager.  Stories that need to be told and secrets that need to be revealed slowly emerge, Alma more broken than she would admit to herself realizes home, with everything and everyone from which she ran away, may be the place she needs the most in order to heal.  A visceral atmosphere of longing, wanting, false prophets giving false hope and the need for redemption where it may not be possible but must instead be overlooked to go on, gives this book the haunting feel of a novel set in the deep, gothic South.  The Home Place is a well-assured debut from a writer with much promise.