Synopses & Reviews
With echoes of Cormac McCarthy, an exquisite debut novel from America's heartland.
Seventeen-year-old Walter Pascoe sets out for his first season as a sheep herder and learns quickly the dangers and beauties of the land. Also awakening to matters of the heart, Walter falls in love with a beautiful trapper named Trina Ivy. As they grow closer, America is on the brink of entering the First World War, and is beginning to feel an economic strain and a growing sense of patriotism. When Walter is drafted, he is bound by duty to leave the land and his lover to serve his country.
With an economic eloquence and an ear for the poetry that permeates life lived close to the land, Parkinson deftly illuminates the rituals and disturbances of her characters' world. She sketches the strong bonds and shifting alliances, the intimacy and insularity of family and social life in the fledgling towns of the American West. Amidst the quiet passion that builds between lovers kept apart by miles of prairie and months of seasonal work, the slow specter of war is creeping over a world that heretofore had seemed immutable.
An epic novel about the brutality of nature, the yearnings of first love and the realities of war, Across Open Ground is a remarkable achievement. Parkinson has written a deceptively quiet work of staggering depth, infused with dignity and heartwrenching emotion.
Review
"[A] lyrical, evocative debut novel...with a tenderness generally absent from more conventional books about this era in the American West."
-Publishers Weekly"An immensely impressive debut... Parkinson displays an astonishing gift for depicting, soldier by soldier, the suffering and uncertainty of an entire unit of spiritually battered veterans returning home by train. Instead of keeping history at bay, as [Cormac] McCarthy so often does, she allows its unsettling presence into her novel, and the book is richer for it." -New York Times Book Review
"A kind of ballad to the American landscape....A mature, strikingly voiced portrait of the American West." --Kirkus Reviews
"With echoes of Cormac McCarthy, [Across Open Ground is a spare and lyrical portrait of the Great Plains."-Idaho Statesman
"[Across Open Ground] demands to be read slowly, maybe even savored...Parkinson touches on larger questions about good and evil, man and nature...vivid...An impressive debut."-Booklist
Synopsis
Set on the brink of World War I, "Across Open Ground" finds 17-year-old Walter Pascoe herding sheep and falling in love with a beautiful trapper named Trina Ivy. When Walter is drafted, he is bound by duty to leave the land and his lover to serve his country.
About the Author
Heather Parkinson is twenty-eight. She lives in Idaho. This is her first novel.