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"Karen Fisher's A Sudden Country is a splendid novel, rendering a past era of America with resonant clarity and unfolding an achingly human story. Fisher also has a distinctively lovely narrative voice. This is a very impressive debut from a writer I will be delighted to follow in the years to come." --Robert Olen Butler
" A gorgeous and mesmerising story of a journey. Fisher provides both the historical context and the perfect detail with equal grace. She deals in big emotions, big adventures, big landscapes and human-sized people. This is a remarkable, remarkable book and I loved every word of it." -- Karen Joy Fowler
"This is a magnificient debut. If it is not a huge critical and commercial success, something is wrong in literary America." -- Larry Watson
"A Sudden Country will take you to the frontiers of your heart. Just let go. Let Karen Fisher's story remind you of what we all know most deeply: life itself - the will to survive - depends on love. -- Thomas Eidson |
New Yorker Magazine, September 12, 2005
"Starting with a few facts of her own ancestor's migration to Oregon, in 1847, Fisher has written a deeply affecting account of the journey West. Lucy Mitchell is travelling -- much against her wishes -- with her second husband and children from both marriages. The family hires as its driver James Mclaren, a former Hudson's Bay Company cartographer and trader accustomed to hardship, yet freshly stung by greater loss than any of them imagine. Both Lucy and James are rich complex characters, and each feels the others pull among the many needs, duties, and persistent ghosts of the journey. The writing is assured, and the novel succeeds in rendering not only the overwhelming landscape and the small, hard details of daily life, but monumental sorrow and the meanderings of love in its many channels."
People Magazine, August 29, 2005. Critics Choice
"A Sudden Country, Karen Fisher's first novel, starts with a bang and ends with a whimper, with miles of fine writing in between... "
Entertainment Weekly, by Karen Karbo, August 19th. Grade A, Editor's Choice
"The tough poetry of Fisher's novel buoys this chronicle of Oregon migation along on an incantatory wave. It's 1847 and dour patriarch Israel Mitchell drags his reluctant wife , Lucy, and their chilren out to the Oregon Territory. Their paths cross with James McLaren, a bereaved Scot trapper whose children have all died from smallpox and whose Nez Perce wife has run off. Each day the murderous landscape spools mercilessly ahead of the emigrants, and Fisher's depiction of a familiar seeming journey that is not adventurous, as myth would have it, but a daily exercise in folly and survival, is astonishing. A Sudden Country requires a patient reader, but the spell it casts is transformative and rare. The hearbreaking first chapter alone is worth any number of lesser novels."
Chicago Tribune, by Art Winslow, August 21, 2005
"...A Sudden Country, which chronicles the flagging hopes and slow slide toward desperation of characters on the Oregon Trail in 1847. I would call it the new "Cold Mountain," to which it bears some similarities of tone and moral compass, efflorescent language and evoked blood, but I consider it a stronger book than Charles Frazier's. Its characterizations are more emotionally nuanced, particularly when it comes to the central romantic liaison, and the slow attenuation of its ending is subtle and powerful...".
Milwaukie Journal Sentinel, by Jim Higgins, September 2005
"...McLaren is a contemporary upgrade of the Western archetype: a skilled hunter, a man of few words, intimate and kind with horses, yet also a scholar of nature, mourning the loss of his telescope, a writer of thoughtful journal entries. He could be kin to Willie Nelson's "Red Headed Stranger", a loner of immense depth and power..."
San Francisco Chronicle, by Max Winter, September 25, 20
"The sex and violence in the novel is brought off convincingly and painfully. The lovemaking between Mclaren and Lucy is born of emotional desperation, while the violence is often born of someting larger: the historical desperation of a country in the process of change, tearing itself apart from the inside out. As difficult as it may be to write a convincing sex scene, Fisher manages some very hot, earthy, 19th century-style clandestine sex here..."
Visit this 'Sudden Country', By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY, August 11, 2005
"I was 50 pages into Karen Fisher's remarkable debut novel, A Sudden Country , before I began to understand the story that was unfolding. Karen Fisher used a pioneering ancestor's journal about moving to Oregon in the 1840s as the basis for Country, her first novel. But the words and images swept me along. Not since Cormac McCarthy's 1992 modern-day Western, All the Pretty Horses , has a novel's opening been as mystifying and mesmerizing. Like McCarthy, Fisher has written a work of art, true to its terrain.
It's a love story set during the Oregon migration of 1847, the first true year of "Oregon fever." One of Fisher's ancestors was 11 that year when her family headed west. Building on a brief, matter-of-fact chronicle her ancestor wrote about their perilous journey ("went no water all day or night and there our nice mare perished"), Fisher has created a tragic and wondrous world. The novel deals with the death of children, the fevered dreams of their ambitious parents and the triumph and cost of civilization. And it's about the work of women, about what it means to be a true wife and mother. The story is told alternately through the eyes of Lucy Mitchell and James MacLaren, who at first seem to have nothing in common. She's a resentful mother of four, a widow whose second husband uproots the family from Iowa in pursuit of dreams she doesn't share. Crossing the country with a baby on her hip, she fears, "This child was too great a gift and would be taken." He's a sorrowful former Hudson Bay Company trapper who's read Shakespeare. He has lost his Nez Perce wife to another man and his three children to the smallpox he brought home. "He used to say: I never trust a man who will forgive himself. Would you?" Lucy and James are morally questioning sinners. She thinks, "How little cure there was for tragedy." He asks himself, "Could a man still carry all the weight of what had gone before, of what had been and what would be, and yet step forward, innocent?" Fisher's writing is simple yet eloquent, earthy but almost biblical. She says a lot in few words. She ends a scene of lovemaking this way: "They took to the floor. They shook down dust from the shingles." Her sentences carry a wallop: "How young we all begin, it seemed. How brave and full of certainty. How terrible it would be to know: not only what we must become, but who we really are." And later: "But if it was the promised land, it was not because of trees and climate, but because, just getting here, they'd found something new inside themselves."
Fisher has worked as a wrangler, farmer and carpenter. Her craft shows in her words and attention to details. But this is not a novel for impatient readers, driven by page-turning plots. It's best read slowly, at the pace of the great trek west. As Fisher's characters reach the Platte River, then Independence Rock and Snake River, I kept turning to the map in front, amazed at how far they'd come, how far they had to go.
It's a tough and tender read. If that's a contradiction, so be it. The West is full of them."
"Spare, but poetic prose illuminates this marvelous retelling of the grueling trek of two characters (a young wife, a Hudson's Bay trapper) along the Oregon Trail in 1847, based on the experiences of the author's own pioneer forebears. "They began their journey with the snow still soft by day, anxious to make way as soon as the season would allow," Fisher writes in one of her crystalline passages. "They wrapped the horses' legs in blankets and traveled under moonlight on the crusted ice."
"A Sudden Country" is being touted by its powerhouse publisher as a worthy successor to "Cold Mountain" and "Snow Falling on Cedars" and should bring much attention to its 44-year-old author, a former wrangler, carpenter and farmer who has lived for seven years in a one-room cabin on Lopez Island with her husband and three children."
The Oregonian, by Jeff Baker, August 14, 2005
"Fisher's remarkable debut novel is set on the Oregon Trail in 1847 and draws on a journal kept by her great-grandmother's grandmother, who came west that year.... Fisher needs no help with her narrative -- she is a born storyteller who has created two memorable characters in James Maclaren, a Hudson's Bay Company trader, and Lucy Mitchell, a widow who's reluctantly going west..."
Los Angeles Times, by Mark Rozzo, August 21, 2005
"...A Sudden Country has the power to deliver hearty souls to strange new territories..."
New Orleans Times-Picayune, by Susan Larson, August 16, 2005
"...Like a campfire Scheherezade, Fisher takes us on the trail, spinning a tale of history, love, survival and last but not least, the power of stories to bind us together. 'How can you know what is the best path alone? Without the words of old people, without the words of friends who know the first name you were called, know the things you have done; how can you understand the right way? To marry? To fight? To mourn? How can one person sing or dance or fight? If your heart is bad, how can it be fixed, how can you ask for punishment, if no one knows your story? If no one saw the bad things you have done? If you always go among strangers, how can you be good? Without bones, without songs, without strength, you are a shadow who wanders, dangerous to others, not long in the world.'"
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fisher builds a grand, mesmerizing novel on the bare chronicle left by her ancestor Emma Ruth Ross Slavin, who was eleven when her family joined the 1847 Oregon migration. Emma's mother, Lucy Mitchell, is a widow, remarried despite her grief for her first husband and resenting the decision of her second husband, Israel Mitchell, to emigrate. James Maclaren is a Scottish trapper for the Hudson Bay Company, uneasy both with the emigrants and with the Native Americans, whose fate is bound up with his own. When McLaren loses his children to smallpox and his Nez Perce wife to another trapper, he tracks the trapper to Lucy Mitchell's wagon train. Lucy and Maclaren's charged encounter opens her up to the land and him to his own need for roots as he signs on to guide her little band on their trek from the Iowa banks of the Missouri to the Columbia River in Oregon. Fisher tells their stories, past and present, with a poet's sense of the sound and heft of each word. Her compassionate, unsentimental eye makes even minor characters unforgettable. She reveals the labor of running a household when there is no house; equally well, she shows us mountains of death and splendor. In the collision between household and wilderness, Fisher brilliantly illuminates both the tragedy and the new life wrought by manifest destiny. This is a great novel of the American West." . Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
With this compelling account of life on the Oregon Trail and the waning days of the fur trade, newcomer Fisher offers a literary masterpiece. The book's entwined narratives follow Lucy Mitchell, one of the author's forebears, and James MacLaren, a former Hudson Bay Company man who has lost his half-breed children to smallpox. When Lucy's imperious husband signs on with a group heading for Oregon, she reluctantly leaves her Iowa home to trek across the country with their four children, including a babe in arms. She and MacLaren meet when he joins their wagon train as a guide under questionable circumstances. Lucy soon senses a connection with MacLaren's sorrow. While Fisher's depiction of the West's grandeur is masterly, she approaches description obliquely, as would a poet, whether she is portraying a fleeting image from the natural world or the novel's major events. Powerful as the historical notes are, the novel's themes of love and connection, resolution of grief, and the wantonness of civilization transcend the Western genre to resonate with all readers. Buy this book!
Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
A first-time novelist turns her own family's past into a vigorous, deeply moving work of historical fiction. It begins in a snowstorm. A man named James MacLaren rides horseback, cradling his last living child, trying to keep her breathing. By the time she dies of smallpox, he's mad with grief and burning with fever himself. Meanwhile, the novel's second protagonist, Lucy Mitchell, has just given birth to a baby girl. It's 1846. Thousands of people are moving west, leaving the United States for new opportunities and imagined riches in the Oregon Territory. When Lucy's husband gets "Oregon fever," he sells their house in Iowa, packs his family in wagons and joins the migration. Few American archetypes are as beloved and clichéd as the pioneer, but Fisher's settlers are vivid and particular. Brave and naïve, generous and cruel, canny and ignorant: They are real, and Fisher manages to make the familiar story of their westward movement strange. She shows us people who are not just traveling to a new world, but creating it as they go, shedding the "civilization" they have known like the too-heavy luxuries they abandon along the trail. Fisher also shows us worlds that are disappearing as Americans crowd the frontier and "settle" the wild places, worlds that have been James MacLaren's home. A trader for the Hudson's Bay Company, MacLaren has spent his whole adult life mapping the uncharted depths of the continent. He meets Lucy after his daughter dies, as he's searching for his Nez Perce wife and the man she ran off with. When MacLaren signs on as driver and guide for the Mitchell family, his story becomes intertwined with Lucy's. Their slowly unfolding relationship is doomed but lovely, and as they negotiate this shared grace, they also discover unknown aspects of themselves. Their parting is inevitable, but they part stronger and wiser—flawed, but noble, exemplars of their moment in history. Elegantly written and powerfully original: a magnificent story and a remarkable debut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews