Athie Wolfe's compelling and timely work of historical fiction brings to life the story of Elizabeth Nickerson, born 200 years ago in the lush woods of Maine, a world of myriad energies. Wolves and trappers, poets and preachers, native and new live side by side in vital, uneasy, and deadly arrangements. Follow Elizabeth as she migrates to the death trap of 1850s Wisconsin, and bear witness to her tragic end.
Dig, Elizabeth might tell us; it's not too late to break deep and fertile ground, to understand that we continue to suffer, to treat our collective wounds, to be young again and again, questioning and inventing. To put our hands in the dirt, together. Plant. There are causes for well-being; choose the new seeds carefully. Walk, together, looking ahead, with clarity and self-care. Chin up. Hold hands.
It is in all of nature to wander, to explore, to wish to discover what's out there just beyond reach. Elizabeth wasn't that far off, she would want us to know. A shift of only two or three degrees and she may have lived to be one hundred, in a tree house, in the nourishing wildness of Maine. She wasn't that far off. Nor are we.
"The historical accuracy of Wolfe's descriptions, of both rural Maine and the frontier settlements in Wisconsin, are insightful and even revelatory for their honesty about the costs imposed on families by the "taming" of the frontier, and particularly on the women who tried to hold those families together. But the aching heart of this novel is the tragedy of the wrong turn. Wolfe allows us to see and empathize with such a decisive moment in one woman's life, and so contemplate our own fragility and transience. For that, and for its intimate biography of a history we thought we knew, Wolfe's novel is a triumph." -Ted Coyle,PhD, author of Nayari History, Politics and Violence: From Flowers to Ash
