What is Heather Brittain Bergstrom reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Heather Brittain Bergstrom, author of Steal the North.

Her entry begins:

I recently read and greatly enjoyed The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen. It’s the story of an American woman who marries a Saudi Arabian man. After living for twenty years in his country, she finds out he has taken a second wife. The political, cultural and natural settings mix to create a world so rich and complex and yet so tangible. What Parssinen does even better than setting, and she does that superbly well, is relationships. She covers the muck and beauty of marriage, the sharp and dull pain of divorce, the scorching and tender love between parents and children. The ...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

A novel of love in all its forms: for the land, for family, and the once-in-a-lifetime kind that catches two people when they least expect it

Emmy is a shy, sheltered sixteen-year-old when her mom, Kate, sends her to eastern Washington to an aunt and uncle she never knew she had. Fifteen years earlier, Kate had abandoned her sister, Beth, when she fled her painful past and their fundamentalist church. And now, Beth believes Emmy’s participation in a faith healing is her last hope for having a child.

Emmy goes reluctantly, but before long she knows she has come home. She feels tied to the rugged landscape of coulees and scablands. And she meets Reuben, the Native American boy next door.

In a part of the country where the age-old tensions of cowboys versus Indians still play out, theirs is the kind of magical, fraught love that can only survive with the passion and resilience of youth. Their story is mirrored by the generation before them, who fears that their mistakes are doomed to repeat themselves in Emmy and Reuben. With Louise Erdrich’s sense of place and a love story in the tradition of Water for Elephants, this is an atmospheric family drama in which the question of home is a spiritual one, in which getting over the past is the only hope for the future.

Visit Heather Brittain Bergstrom's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Steal the North.

Writers Read: Heather Brittain Bergstrom.

--Marshal Zeringue