I was happy to receive this book as an ARC because it’s the kind of story I enjoy, one that involves researching family history and exploring family trauma. It’s also a chilling look at how easy it was to institutionalize women in insane asylums at the turn of the 20th century.
Rachel is a woman in her late 30’s, not-so-happily married to Blake, an Arizona Congressman running for a new term. Their lives are dominated by Blake’s father, who cares more about their political success than anything else. Worse, Blake’s father is a far-right extremist who wants his son to say and do anything that gets him elected. And Rachel’s need to please her own family (which comes from having a sibling who died as a child) has led to her never doing anything that feels right for her. Then she starts to see signs that her husband is having an affair.
As Rachel’s mother is cleaning out her house, she asks Rachel to pick up an old blue trunk that belonged to her great-aunt Marit. The family knows nothing about Marit except that she emigrated from Norway with her siblings, and that she was “crazy”. Rachel pieces together a few facts from the documents in the trunk and starts researching Marit’s history, beginning with the asylum in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Marit’s story is a compelling one, and anyone who likes historical fiction will appreciate this look at the 1900’s through the 1930’s. Lowry packs a lot of information in this book, from asylum and tuberculosis treatments of the time, to gangsters in St. Louis and Chicago, to ranching in the Arizona desert.
As I’m from Arizona and spend a lot of time in Wisconsin, the settings of this book (other than Norway) felt happily familiar to me. In fact, the characters spend time in Sunnyslope, Arizona, caring for people with tuberculosis. Sunnyslope is a small area in Phoenix, more of a neighborhood now, and it’s a place where my mother worked and lived for many years.
This is Lowry’s first novel, though she has been writing nonfiction for years, and her career has focused on conflict resolution and communications. The story in this book is based on her actual ancestor Marit Sletmo, though the book is largely fictional.
My one criticism of the book is that the writing felt a little wooden at times, the dialog particularly stiff. Lowry excels in the historical details and exploring the feelings of the characters, but this book does have the feel of an author who has not written a lot of fiction.
I found Rachel’s character hard to sympathize with at first — marrying someone you don’t really have feelings for because you want to please your mother, then giving up your career and doing only what your husband wants — that’s a hard thing for me to wrap my head around. Fortunately, as the book goes on, Lowry shows us the foundations of Rachel’s character, and also delves more into Rachel’s marriage. I appreciated that Lowry ultimately makes Rachel’s mother and husband multi-dimensional characters.
I enjoyed this story overall. I appreciated the detailed history as well as the interesting psychological journeys of the characters. Another excellent book about the institutionalization of women around the turn of the century is Stacie Murphy’s A Deadly Fortune.
Note: I received an advanced review copy of this novel from publicist Books Forward and publisher Koehler Books. This book published September 10, 2024.