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|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION MEY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION MEY | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of small-town Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible event--their loss, their place in it, and the secrets they all carry.
In this brilliantly written novel, one girl's story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her. Among them, a supermarket clerk recalls an encounter with a disturbingly thin Hayley Jo. An ex-priest remembers baptizing Hayley Jo and seeing her with her best friend, Laura, whose mother the priest once loved. And Laura berates herself for all the running they did, how it fed her friend's addiction, and how there were so many secrets she didn't see. And so, Hayley Jo's absence recasts the lives of others and connects them, her death rooting itself into the community in astonishingly violent and tender ways.
Solidly in the company of Aryn Kyle, Kent Haruf, and Peter Matthiessen, Kent Meyers is one of the best contemporary writers on the American West. Here he also takes us into the complexity of community regardless of landscape, and offers a tribute to the powerful effect one person's life can have on everyone she knew.
Author Notes
KENT MEYERS is the author of The Work of Wolves , Light in the Crossing , The River Warren , and The Witness of Combines . He is a recipient of an ALA Alex Award, two Minnesota Book Awards, and a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award. His work has been included in the New York Times list of Notable Books and is published in a wide array of prestigious magazines.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his beautiful and unsettling new novel, Meyers (The Work of Wolves) examines the effects of a murder on the residents of a small South Dakota town. In an opening sequence that is so disturbing it's difficult to read, teen Hayley Jo Zimmerman is stalked and abducted by a serial killer. The rest of the novel uses the rippling consequences of Hayley Jo's murder to explore the smaller rural tragedies in Twisted Tree, S.D.: Elise, a forlorn grocery clerk, judges everyone by their purchases and hides the secret terrors of her past as a missionary; Sophie Lawrence cares for her invalid stepfather while losing her sanity; Angela Morrison learns to accept the harsh realities of being a rancher's wife; Stanley, Haley Jo's father, channels his grief into a desperate need to connect with a stranger. The novel is brimming with arresting descriptions, and the western setting is employed to surprising effect, as in a sequence contrasting the removal of an invasive salt cedar bush with a father's awareness of his son's first crush. Meyers's small masterpiece deserves comparison to the work of Raymond Carver, Joy Williams and Peter Matthiessen. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Dark portrait of a High Plains community. Serial killer traps latest victim! There's no resisting the power of the opening chapter, told from the viewpoint of the so-called I-90 killer. He's been visiting pro-Ana Web sites to target anorexic young women. Now he's closing in on Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a sales clerk in Rapid City, S.D., originally from the small town of Twisted Tree. Posing on the site as an older woman, he's learned all Hayley Jo's secrets. They meet face-to-face and he lures her into his Continental before she realizes his identity. Readers hoping for more white-knuckle suspense will be disappointed, for Meyers (The Work of Wolves, 2004, etc.) then shifts gears to begin a ruminative study of Twisted Tree residents, many of whom had contact with Hayley Jo. The author spins a web of relationships, scatters what-ifs and sounds the themes of guilt and innocence. This is a landscape soaked in blood. The first white settler, Old Joe Valen, forced Native Americans off their land, then shot dead one of their number fleeing Wounded Knee. We meet their descendants. Eddie Little Feather, drunk in the road, will be decapitated by a tractor trailer. The last of the Valens, Shane, is a creepy poacher who sleeps among animals. Meyers' prose is strikingly physical, sometimes thrillingly so: driving on the highway, Angela Morrison realizes there's a rattlesnake nestling at her feet. But occasionally he wanders into gothic territory; there are entirely too many rattlers attending the gruesome deaths of Shane and his mother. Throughout, the bell tolls for Hayley Jo. What if friends had intervened over her anorexia? The questions linger as we delve into other lives. Sometimes connections seem forced, yet Meyers brings everything into alignment for his epilogue, in which a group of Native Americans conduct an offbeat, good-humored exorcism involving the killer's Continental. Terrific opening, terrific close, but a bumpy ride in between. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
In this novel, a girl's disappearance sets off ripples of grief. TWISTED TREE, Kent Meyers's fictional small town, is in rodeo country, somewhere on the eastern perimeter of the Black Hills in South Dakota, where the "creased and broken" land is vast and veined by dirt roads. Drive past ranches and mud lakes and bone-filled buffalo jumps and you'll spot the local bar, Ruination. The town's inhabitants are still deeply haunted by the massacre at nearby Wounded Knee, and now, in Meyers's impressive third novel, their grieving continues with the disappearance of Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a onetime barrel racing champion and one of the town's young daughters. "Everyone has a life that no one else knows," Meyers writes. This statement could be spoken by any of the town's residents, but Meyers ascribes it to the stranger who prowls Interstate 90 in a big blue Lincoln Continental. In the book's terrifying opening chapter, Hayley Jo, or Hayjay, as she's nicknamed, gets into his car. Hayjay is quietly vanishing from anorexia, but it's the other quite literal vanishing that shakes the town. A small rural community like Twisted Tree relies on its citizens. When someone goes missing, shock waves course through the lives of its roofers, ranchers, patrolmen, caregivers and pastors. Even the town poacher registers the loss. And losses this significant can stir up people's own stories. Meyers creates a stunning narrative of these stories, 16 in all, quilting together an intricate patchwork from confessions, remembrances and secrets. Each chapter, a completely self-contained account, deepens our understanding of other community members while touching upon the mysterious circumstances of Hayjay's disappearance. What's most wonderful is Meyers's casting. There's not one flat, uninteresting character in the bunch. After that first glimpse of Hayjay, Meyers introduces Elise, the supermarket clerk. Elise knows "the preferences of every family'' and checks groceries "so slowly she could be memorizing them." (She is.) Elise is the community's registrar of secrets, its "voiceless oracle," and, like everyone, hobbled by her own inescapable past. Elise offers opinions on nearly everyone, including Shane Valen, who spends "his nights grocery shopping, with a rifle." He's a quasi-feral man who sleeps among buffalo and lives off the land his grandfather sold. Shane creeps, like vapor, seemingly everywhere, including the night Hayley Jo is born along a country road, "a blood-red girlchild held up to the light." People think Shane's "crazy as a bag of drywall screws," but he too has secrets. So does Sophie Lawrence, who takes care of her invalid stepfather. She's considered a saint among the townsfolk. Nobody knows, however, that she privately mistreats him, oversaving his food or wheeling him "into the sunlight to let stray dogs sniff and growl at him," as payback for childhood abuses. Meyers isn't squeamish about tough subject matter. He doesn't shun life's synchronicities, either. He embraces the "invisible filaments" that connect one thing to the next. People and objects disappear and reappear for different purposes - including that big blue Lincoln Continental. It's a dirty, haunted shell by the time Leonard Sends For Him, a quietly noble Lakota man, purchases it. Leonard "is a kind of heyoka" (in Lakota culture, a sacred trickster or jester endowed with a special purpose). When Leonard parks the Continental on a frozen stretch of Lostman's Lake, to ice fish, the ice buckles and he maroons the car. A festive community forms around Leonard's mistake. People gather at the lake "roasting hot dogs on sticks, eating Indian tacos and drinking Budweiser," betting on when the car will drop. A tradition even comes of it; that's "how half the Indians in Twisted Tree came to celebrate St Patrick's Day." It's a funny, necessary chapter, proving that while Meyers can certainly show what bruises the deepest, he's also capable of recognizing, as the car disappears into cleansing waters, what helps people heal. Don Waters is the author of the story collection "Desert Gothic."
Library Journal Review
Though identified as a "novel" on the title page, this is more accurately a collection of loosely related short stories, all set in or near Twisted Tree in western South Dakota. The central event binding the stories is the murder of Hayley Jo Zimmerman by a serial killer who targets anorexics after befriending them online. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character, not all of whom knew Hayley Jo personally, though all know of the event. Other "ghosts" haunt the characters' lives, whether memories of lost loved ones or painful echoes from the past. We're in dark territory here, with little humor to relieve the grim tone. But Meyers has great respect for the diversity of his characters' rich internal lives and experiences, though they might appear outwardly stoic and unemotional. Verdict Recommended for readers of good literary fiction set in the American West.-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
