Unmoored

UNMOORED, a novel

Carving from memory the ground she will stand on, Rennie England returns to the family home in Idaho and begins her journey to find out what happened to her father. It will take her to his bedroom, to a candle in the room and a key in the lock, to other rooms where people fell in love, where people died. As she asks who was locked in and who was locked out, she hears in a new way the voices of her life— the father who hangs his twins, but not by the neck; the grandmother, whose light comes with cinnamon and salt; the lover, who is the one right thing and out of reach even before he is assassinated; the deaf boy who teaches her to hear; Thelma Myzeld, confidante, who knows Montana needs more smokers.

Rennie finds healing when she revisits her grandparents’ sawmill cabin in the Centennial Mountains, its paths strewn with the light of morning, the shadow of dusk, the scent of alpine daisies and Douglas fir, of grass and mint and brook. She is learning what we get to keep and what we don’t get to keep, what we want to know and what we can’t let ourselves know, what we love and what we unwittingly betray.