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Summary
Summary
Those who live in the isolated port town of Two Harbors, Minnesota, still remember the strange downfall of Lila Maywood--a striking beauty who abandoned her family for Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star. Lila's disappearance has defined the life of her daughter, Casey, left with only an autographed, heart-shaped headshot of her mother. When a big-city stranger shows up in town, Casey reluctantly falls for him, only to have him desert her, too. This new abandonment brings Casey face-to-face with the legacy of her mother's past, and the possibility that her own future could follow the same course. Against her father's counsel, Casey journeys from Two Harbors to Hollywood, where she discovers a world of secret lives and shifting roles that holds revealing truths about those who left her behind.
Cinematic and suspenseful, this is the electrifying story of a daughter learning the one act her mother never mastered: letting go.
Author Notes
KATE BENSON's fiction has appeared in the Hawaii Review, the Allegheny Review, and USA Weekend and has been honored by Seventeen magazine and the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. She lives in Boston. Two Harbors is her first novel.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Benson's fluent debut novel follows the bittersweet coming-of-age of Casey Maywood, whose mother, Lila, abandons her with her father in the titular Minnesota town for a chance at stardom in Hollywood. Before she vanishes in pursuit of her dream, gorgeous but unbalanced Lila shapes young Casey in her own image: a beautiful blonde dissimulator and heartbreaker. Casey always hopes Lila will return, although her father doesn't reveal that his troubled wife has sought a divorce and is likely remarried. Years later, working at a movie theater, Casey meets Dex Stone, a handsome older man from L.A. Their relationship (her first real love affair) ignites, but his abrupt death in a plane crash leaves her reeling with previously buried feelings of abandonment. At the urging of Dex's brother, Kevin, Casey flies to Hollywood to attend the funeral-and search for her lost mother. Benson's first-person narrative switches back and forth from Casey's life in Two Harbors to her dizzying reinvention in Hollywood as she cavorts with Kevin and learns the truth of Dex's privileged past. Benson demonstrates capable craft, though she skirts the resolution of the mother-daughter relationship with unsubtle plotting. Agent, Alex Glass. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Haunting, lush, and lyrical, Benson's sublimely atmospheric debut novel of a daughter's quest for the mother who abandoned her and the lover she herself rejected vividly traces the psychic upheaval and emotional breakdown such cataclysmic events portend. Within their desolate Minnesota port town, Casey Maywood's mother, Lila, is an anachronism. Strikingly beautiful and seductively glamorous, Lila knows she is destined for Hollywood stardom, and so strong is her desire for the adulation of a devoted audience, she forsakes her only child to pursue her dream. Casey copes with the loss the best way an impressionable young woman can, by spurning all potential lovers before they inevitably hurt her. But when Dex walks into her life, Casey is confronted with the one love she knows she shouldn't discard, a realization she comes to only after Dex dies in a plane crash. Weaving a sensitive psychological portrait with a powerful tale of pursuit, Benson writes with a poetic voice as passionate as it is precise. --Carol Haggas Copyright 2005 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A contrived debut about an emotionally confounded young woman trying to find her mother. Casey Maywood's mother, a former Winter Queen, always wanted to be a movie star--more than she wanted to be a mom, apparently, because in 1995 she abandoned her young daughter and husband in Two Harbors, Minn., and ran off to Hollywood, leaving barely a trace. The scandal surrounding mom's abandonment damaged Casey's relationship with her passive father. By the time Casey is 19, a film student and fledgling actress, it's time to find some answers about her mysterious, mentally unstable mother, who taught her daughter to act the part of the lover without ever allowing herself to fall in love. Too late for Casey, who has just met the new guy in town, Dex Stone, from L.A., at the screening of an indie film called Two Harbors. The lovers only have a few months together before Dex is killed on a return flight to Duluth from L.A.; and when Dex's younger brother, Kevin, asks Casey to come out to the funeral in Hollywood, she accepts, thinking this a perfect opportunity to hunt for her lost mother. The plotting grows increasingly far-fetched as the novel melds into the Two Harbors film, involving the brothers' Gatsby-esque father and his actress girlfriend, whom both sons seemed to have shared. Casey comes up with some clues to her mother's disappearance at a strip club, plausible enough until Benson forcefully ties the whole charade up in an incredible knot. The rich, entitled brothers have few distinguishing characteristics, while Casey is a vulnerable, dreamy, sad character whose mother seems to have robbed her of a true identity: "Aren't we all just actors looking for the same break?" one character asks of Casey. Moments of fine observation amid bewildering disequilibrium. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Benson's first novel is a remarkable coming-of-age story enhanced by strong dialog and poetic verse. Her cinematic descriptions move the action along as though a camera were logging each scene. Twentysomething Casey Maywood lives in the small, isolated Minnesotan town that gives the novel its title. Her mother, Lila, known for her astonishingly good looks, leaves Two Harbors to seek movie stardom in Hollywood, and Casey endures this loss in her own way, recklessly pursuing short-term relationships and one-night stands. Then she falls in love with Dex, a handsome young man she meets while working at the local movie theater. Before Casey is able to come to terms with her feelings, he is killed in a plane crash. The story moves west to Los Angeles when Casey decides to attend Dex's funeral and locate her mother. Casey's determination to find answers does not yield a stereotypical Hollywood ending, but it's unfortunate that the conclusion fails to resolve all the issues that the complex plot creates. Recommended for large fiction collections.-Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon Libs., Eugene (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
A mother takes her daughter's hand and leads her underwater.Blue. Cold, and shimmering through the dark. In reality, just the high school gym-but with the lights dimmed to a wintry sparkle, poster-board seaweed reaching up the walls, it's easy to pretend you've fallen into something magical. Today is the end of Winter Frolic, the annual Two Harbors fair. The theme this year, "Beneath the Ice," has sunk the town past the solid surface of Lake Superior to an arctic, exotic underworld, and the daughter looks around with a ten-year-old's appreciative awe: silver balloons in bubbly bursts, wispy blue streamers across the windows. The icy facade of those watery lights. Hand-cut paper snowflakes defy the laws of physics and shed their twinkling glitter across the hardwood bed of the lake. And in the middle of the basketball court, rising up like the Atlantis of the north shore, a gigantic white float waits for the coronation of the Winter Royalty, its red thrones like sunken hearts all in a row.It's the last and most important event before the all-town chili dinner; the daughter savors every breath and detail of this, her first and last year as a member of the court. They move through the crowds, past bleachers packed with students, parents, grandparents, neighbors, the whole town awaiting the selection of those girls who will become, briefly yet brightly, minor celebrities in their respective schools."When I was crowned," the mother whispers in her ear, "they put my picture in the paper. Front page. There were boys from all over calling the editors for my number-Silver Bay, Beaver Bay. These twin brothers in Duluth.""Dad, too?""Relentlessly. Endlessly." She sighs. "Endlessly. That's when they were saying I should take my chances in Hollywood."The mother was the Winter Queen in her senior year of high school. She still has the crown; some of the fake diamonds are missing now. The daughter is not allowed to wear it, though she sneaks into her mother's closet sometimes and becomes, in secret, a captive princess, waiting for someone to find her and rescue her and fall tragically in love."Just remember not to cry if they crown someone else princess," the mother whispers. "The odds are against you, so don't get your hopes up."Pretend you are a princess inside, secretly. I'm the only one who knows.The daughter nods, heart swollen with love or fear or the familiar knot of both. She squeezes her mother's hand, adjusts her shimmering dress nervously as they approach the rest of the "10 and under" court waiting near the float."Blue as your eyes," observes Mrs. Simmons from nearby, pulling a little too hard on the sleeve of her dress. The daughter looks down modestly. "Just look at you. Seems like yesterday your mama was up there and her mama was watching. What do they call it-succession?""The royal family," someone says.The mother pulls her hand away from an ever-tightening grip. "Let's not count our chickens.""Boy, does she look like yo Excerpted from Two Harbors by Kate Benson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
