Publishers Weekly - Publishers Weekly Audio
Bernadette Dunne's distinctive gravelly voice, so effective in her recording of The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, unfortunately makes her depiction of Enidina (Eddie), an early 20th-century farm wife, dull and droning. Carrington MacDuffe's Mary, Eddie's closest neighbor, offers us a better sense of Hoover's lyrical prose, and her family scenes are much livelier. Through child birth and death, drought and flood, heat and cold, war and depression, the two women are drawn together first by necessity and later by complex emotional bonds, then forced apart by internecine family and community struggles. An Other Press hardcover (Reviews, May 10). (Aug.)
Publishers Weekly
Hoover's powerful debut tells the story of the intertwined fortunes of two early 20th-century Midwestern farm women. From the time Enidina Current and her husband, Frank, move into the hardscrabble farmhouse a day's wagon ride away from Enidina's family, their closest neighbors, Jack and Mary Morrow, perplex them, though their proximity and shared farm work often bring the two couples together. Sharing the narrative, stoic Enidina struggles through several miscarriages before finally bearing twins, while the more delicate Mary reels from disappointment, most of all in her volatile husband. Moving through the Depression, the families are driven farther apart from each other, even while Mary's youngest spends most of his time in the Current household, until an accident and a betrayal drive the final wedge into their lives. In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover's characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world. (July)
From the Publisher
A finely-crafted debut . . . vivid, fascinating . . . The novel grows richer with each page as Hoover’s quiet lyricism gradually asserts itself . . . Hoover has a gift.”—The Boston Globe
“In its deceptively simple, hypnotic prose and its attempt to understand, through fiction, the inner lives of long-lost rural characters who left few records behind, The Quickening inevitably recalls So Long, See You Tomorrow [by] William Maxwell.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“In Hoover’s début, the quiet struggle between two Midwestern farm women has the stark simplicity of a Biblical parable....The book’s lament for a lost way of life—one in which people ‘looked in hope to the ground and the roots growing there more often than we looked for grace from the sky’—has a mournful beauty.”—The New Yorker
“With prose as stark as the Midwestern landscape the novel is set in, Hoover brings a pair of early 20th century farm wives vividly to life.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Michelle Hoover’s debut novel is a haunting, beautifully told story that explores the hardships of the Great Depression by focusing on two families. . . Hoover writes with such emotional clarity. . .A captivating and heartfelt first novel.” —BookPage
“Expertly crafted and authentic.”—Poets & Writers
“Engrossing . . . Hoover burns away the glamour of the pioneer life, blending history and brilliant storytelling. [A] standout novel.” —Library Journal (starred)
“A vivid, pastoral panorama.” —Kirkus Reviews
“In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover's characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“I grew up among Iowa farm women, and Michelle Hoover has perfectly captured their voices and stories with great wisdom, tenderness, and beauty.”—Ted Kooser, U. S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
“Just as the women and men in this strikingly assured debut novel wrest life out of the land they work, Michelle Hoover wrests from her characters' hearts, and from this heart-touching story, understandings rich in complexity and compassion. She paints the intricacies of their interiors as skillfully as she does the details of the world that surrounds them. What a gift she has given us in this wise book that lets us so vividly experience both.”—Josh Weil, author of The New Valley
“From the very first sentence of Michelle Hoover’s debut novel, I was captured. More than once, I paused while reading to savor her elegant prose and the hauntingly beautiful story she tells of two farmwives bound by loneliness and their cruel circumstances. The Quickening is a stunning debut by an astonishingly gifted writer with a long career ahead of her.”—Amy Greene, author of Bloodroot
“Michelle Hoover's fine debut novel recreates for us a way of life and a set of personalities that have vanished from our current scene, and she does so with a solidity of detail that will impress these people and these places forever on your memory.” —Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love
“Though The Quickening is her first novel, Michelle Hoover does what all the best writers steeped in a particular place do—use that place as a conduit to the universal and timeless mysteries of the heart. What an exceptional debut this book is.” —Ron Rash, author of Serena
“The Quickening is a rare jewel of a novel: an elegantly structured page-turner driven as much by its exquisite lyricism as it is by the gripping story at its core. It wondrously weaves a riveting half-century of American Midwestern history through the sensual, intimate, often strange details that make up a life. Michelle Hoover is a stunning writer and this is a fierce and beautiful book.” —Maud Casey, author of Genealogy
“From the opening pages of this beautiful novel, I found myself immersed in the lives of these two farm women between the wars and their struggles with their families, themselves, the land and each other. The Quickening is such a fully realized, sensually vivid, psychologically intelligent novel that it's hard to believe it is a debut, but it is and a sparkling one.” —Margot Livesey
“Michelle Hoover’s writing is brilliant and gutsy. She sees deeply, with great wisdom and compassion, and she creates characters who are complex and authentic.” —Ursula Hegi
“The Quickening, through its carefully wrought, precise prose, builds with a heartrending power that lingers long after the final page. Michelle Hoover is a writer to watch.” —Don Lee
Kirkus Reviews
The struggles and embroilments of neighboring farm households in the upper Midwest beginning in the summer of 1913 through the Great Depression, as narrated by the farmers' wives. From the beginning, Enidina Current, Eddie for short, is wary of Mary Morrow, and for good reason-the misfortunes the Morrows visit on the Currents are nothing short of biblical. Mary plays the piano and seems ill at ease with the hand she's been dealt, hard work on the farm with her boys and her rough and sometimes abusive husband Jack. Mary is religious and plays more than just the piano in the lonesome white chapel their pastor, Borden, built with his father. Eddie's first pregnancy results in a miscarriage-no small blow in a world where children mean the sort of additional labor that can make or break a farm. Somehow, even in this misfortune, there's the taint of blame. Far-flung as these individualistic farming families might be, judgment and gossip run rampant. Eddie's is the story of wrongdoing inflicted by the self-righteous on the innocent, of blame twisted from the doer onto the victim. Despite their initial aloofness, the families forge bonds when Eddie turns to Mary for help pending the birth of twins. The households intertwine when one of the Morrow boys, Kyle, whose sensitivity sets him apart from his ilk, becomes a regular fixture on the Current farm. When the Currents, who cannot abide waste, refuse to go along with the killing of pigs as mandated by a movement for solidarity among the region's farmers desperate to drive prices up, Jack takes matters into his own hands. Bloodshed foreshadows the ultimate penalty Eddie and her family will pay. The tale develops through the narration of both women from later in their lives, elucidating with dramatic irony the warped nature of the judgments and self-justifications of the devout in a community pushed to extremes by the Depression, where some go so far as to call cowardice bravery and to impose their own twisted fears on others. Hoover paints stormy scenes of individuals and communities at odds with one another and with their own dark histories in a vivid, pastoral panorama. Ultimately, this is the story of survival-how life quickens and is borne on through turmoil, pain and perseverance. At times slow-moving, but imbued throughout with a careful and evenly wrought lyricism.
