Michelle Hoover. (2016). Bottomland: A Novel. Grove Atlantic.

Michelle Hoover. 2016. Bottomland: A Novel. Grove Atlantic.

Michelle Hoover, Bottomland: A Novel. Grove Atlantic, 2016.

Michelle Hoover. Bottomland: A Novel. Grove Atlantic, 2016.

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   • bioText: Michelle Hoover is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University and teaches at GrubStreet, where she leads the Novel Incubator program. She is a 2014 NEA Fellow and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell Fellow, and a winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award. Her debut, The Quickening, was a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read." She is a native of Iowa and lives in Boston.
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Bottomland

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“A lyrical, at times mysterious, and dreamy tale of family ties . . . An intriguing, modern take on a classic American landscape” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland follows the Hess family in the years after World War I, as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains. In the weeks after Esther and Myrle’s disappearance, their siblings desperately search for them, through the stark farmlands to the unfamiliar world of far-off Chicago. Have the girls run away to another farm? Have they gone to the city to seek a new life? Or were they abducted? Ostracized and misunderstood in their small town in the wake of the war, the Hesses fear the worst.
 
From the acclaimed author of The Quickening, “Bottomland is more than a literary mystery. It’s a trance, a poem, a lamentation, a benediction. And it’s breathtaking. As in: remind yourself to breathe” (Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers).
 
“Hoover skillfully interweaves many of the Hess family members’ narratives. Her descriptions of the bleak rural landscape are chilling. Fans of Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall will enjoy the plot; Willa Cather enthusiasts will relish the setting; and Theodore Dreiser readers will savor the gritty characterizations.” —Library Journal (starred review)
 
“There are many compelling things about Michelle Hoover’s potent new novel, Bottomland, not least of all her austere style and its visceral punch.” —The Boston Globe

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Boston Globe
   • content: "There are many compelling things about Michelle Hoover's potent new novel, Bottomland, not least of all her austere style and its visceral punch. . . . Hoover's story, set largely in the immediate wake of World War I, has so much contemporary resonance. Bottomland is transporting, for sure, as it travels back to a world where home-heating pipes were a novelty, where poor farm families had little to eat, less to say, and even less to celebrate. But the hatred and xenophobia that mark Hoover's plot aren't distant at all . . . As much as Bottomland evokes a grim American past with enough mastery to justify comparisons to Willa Cather, it also speaks of our present tense. . . . You're in the hands of a writer who won't disappoint."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
   • content: "A mystery wrapped in isolation and ethnic fear. . . . [An] atmospheric and engaging tale, which turns out to be as much about sibling rivalry as about mistrust and oppression."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Chicago Book Review
   • content: “Part mystery, part tragedy, part coming-of-age narrative . . . the depth of Bottomland makes for a beautiful second novel by Hoover."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Library Journal (starred review)
   • content: "Hoover skillfully interweaves many of the Hess family members' narratives. Her descriptions of the bleak rural landscape is chilling. Fans of Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall will enjoy the plot; Willa Cather enthusiasts will relish the setting; and Theodore Dreiser readers will savor the gritty characterizations."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Kirkus Reviews
   • content: "A lyrical, at times mysterious, and dreamy tale of family ties . . . Deftly imagined and written, Hoover's second novel offers an intriguing, modern take on a classic American landscape."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "Hoover vividly describes the harsh realities of life on a farm, on the battlefield, and in a Chicago sweatshop through the eyes of masterfully drawn characters. A novel as poignant as it is clear-eyed."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: "Well-formed characters propel a consistently compelling tale."
8. • premium: False
   • source: Rebecca Makkai, author of Music for Wartime and The Hundred-Year House
   • content: "Bottomland is more than a literary mystery. It's a trance, a poem, a lamentation, a benediction. And it's breathtaking. As in: remind yourself to breathe."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading
   • content: "Immensely readable. From small town to the grit of the city, family farm to union factories, the Midwest of Michelle Hoover's Bottomland is alive with secrets, hard choices, and the acute costs of independence."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Jenna Blum, New York Times and internationally bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers
    • content: "Comparisons to Dreiser and Cather are inevitable when you read Michelle Hoover's classic heartland novels because Hoover knows rural life, its unforgiving reality and its people so well; in Bottomland, she makes this landscape her own with new vivid lyricism. This post-WWI novel about an ostracized German-American family searching Iowa and Chicago for their missing teenaged girls is poignant, powerful, and hypnotically readable."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Kate Racculia, author of Bellweather Rhapsody
    • content: "Michelle Hoover writes with a grace both fierce and tender about place, loss, and hope, about the words that go unsaid and the parts of a heart that remain unknown. A mystery, a family story, and a stark portrait of a time in American history, Bottomland moved me. It haunts me still."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Holly LeCraw, author of The Swimming Pool and The Half Brother
    • content: "Bottomland is an unforgettable tale of a farm family struggling to survive, and of the fears that threaten them from both within and without. With unmistakable echoes of Cather and Dreiser, the voices of the Hess family, stark and graceful as the unforgiving Iowa prairie itself, are shot through with longing--for the past, for love, for acceptance, and, most dangerous and exhilarating of all, for change. This is a beautiful book about resilience, survival, and the tenacity of family bonds."
13. • premium: False
    • source: Dawn Tripp, author of Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O'Keefe
    • content: "I love this novel. Bottomland is a work of unusual intelligence--enthralling and precise. Michelle Hoover has woven an incandescent story of a family torn apart by war and loss, and she has done so with such breathtaking insight, you can almost feel these lives rise off the page."
14. • premium: False
    • source: Allison Amend, author of Enchanted Islands
    • content: "Bottomland is a magnificent, sweeping book, filled with the hardship of immigrant life and the poignancy of family ties. Michelle Hoover has taken up Willa Cather's mantle in chronicling the beautiful...
15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 11, 2016
      In her second novel, Hoover (The Quickening) presents a multigenerational family saga. Set in the Iowa plains in the years surrounding World War I, the book tells the story of the Hess family from the perspectives of the patriarch, a German immigrant, and four of his six children. As anti-German sentiment spreads around them and has irreversible impact on each of their lives, the two youngest Hess daughters vanish in the middle of the night. Through shifts in points of view, the story spans the years before, during, and after the war as the central mystery unfolds. Nan, the eldest daughter, struggles to keep the family together after the death of their mother and wonders what role she might have played in her sisters’ disappearance. Her father, Jon Julius, haunted by his past and wondering about its bearing on his present, traces his path since immigrating from Germany, seeking farmland in Iowa, and starting a family. The youngest brother, Lee, recalls his time in the army as he travels through Chicago in search of his missing sisters. Though it sometimes seems like information is obscured in order to maintain the mysterious aspects of the narrative, Hoover’s well-formed characters propel a consistently compelling tale. Agent: Esmond Harmsworth, Zachary Schuster Harmsworth.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      January 1, 2016
      The voices emerging from a brooding farmhouse in early-20th-century Iowa reveal its residents' secrets and desires--some expected, some less so. Through the faceted first-person accounts of four siblings and their father, Hoover (The Quickening, 2010, etc.) delivers a lyrical, at times mysterious, and dreamy tale of family ties. Its focus is several generations of the Hess clan, headed by Jon Julius, who emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1892, staking 150 acres of Midwestern bottomland as a homestead for his wife and the six children they would have. Some 20 years later, the Hess family may seem rooted, but the demands of survival on the land are relentless, and their isolation is intensified by a dispute with neighbors, a crippling accident, and the anti-German sentiment arising from World War I. Yet Hoover's tale is about more than the Hess' hardscrabble rural existence, moving as it does from wide open fields to the grime and toil of urban factories and overseas to the blasted wastes of Europe, all the while exploring the psychologies and complicated, sometimes unreliable, and unexpected bonds among the siblings. When two of the sisters, Esther and Myrle, disappear from the farmhouse one night, the notion of home is cracked wide open, never to be restored. Lee, the son who went to war and returned traumatized, sets off for Chicago to search for the girls but eventually returns without them. Esther's and then Myrle's accounts follow, overlapping yet divergent, while Hoover plays a sly hand of revelation, leaving the truth about how and why the girls escaped to emerge late and plangently. Deftly imagined and written, Hoover's second novel offers an intriguing, modern take on a classic American landscape.

      COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from December 1, 2015
      

      Shortly after World War I draws to an end, the youngest Hess sisters, Myrle and Esther, vanish from their farm in rural Iowa. Their family must piece together what happened to the girls while struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy. In addition, they must deal with anti-German sentiment from their neighbors. When Lee, the girls' older brother, returns from France after serving in the trenches with the U.S. Army, he desperately searches for Myrle and Esther, following a trail that leads him to Chicago. VERDICT A finalist for the Flaherty-Dunham First Novel prize, Hoover (The Quickening) skillfully interweaves many of the Hess family members' narratives. Her descriptions of the bleak rural landscape is chilling. Fans of Jim Harrison's Legends of the Fall will enjoy the plot; Willa Cather enthusiasts will relish the setting; and Theodore Dreiser readers will savor the gritty characterizations. [Library marketing; seven-city tour.]--Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

18. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 1, 2016
      In a novel that spans decades, Hoover focuses on the life of a farm family of German heritage shortly after WWI. Even though Julius Hess acquired his Iowa acreage years earlier, and the younger of his two sons, Lee, enlisted (after his brother was badly injured) and fought in France, there are murmurs of Kraut in their community. When the two youngest of the four Hess daughtersEsther, 16, and Myrle, 14disappear, they are presumed to be runaways, even when Myrle's favorite dress is found bloodied and torn, and the possibility of foul play arises. Five narrators add depth and texture to the story: Nan, the oldest of the six Hess children, who's functioning as mother; widower Julius, recalling his marriage and emigration from Germany; Lee, in war-torn France; and Esther and Myrle, whose stories are revealed only in the later pages. Hoover (The Quickening, 2010) vividly describes the harsh realities of life on a farm, on the battlefield, and in a Chicago sweatshop through the eyes of masterfully drawn characters. A novel as poignant as it is clear-eyed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

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“A lyrical, at times mysterious, and dreamy tale of family ties . . . An intriguing, modern take on a classic American landscape” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland follows the Hess family in the years after World War I, as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains. In the weeks after Esther and Myrle’s disappearance, their siblings desperately search for them, through the stark farmlands to the unfamiliar world of far-off Chicago. Have the girls run away to another farm? Have they gone to the city to seek a new life? Or were they abducted? Ostracized and misunderstood in their small town in the wake of the war, the Hesses fear the...

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