Nothing in my inbox from local readers this week. Luckily, or unluckily, for those who appreciate this column, I’ve read two books since we last talked and I’m well on my way to completing a third.
I mentioned in our last edition that my reading pace had hit a bit of a speed bump as I began Jodi Picoult’s Second Glance. I’ve read many a Picoult, and I can usually settle into her deeply researched narratives, parallel timelines, and shifting points of view without much effort.
This one, though, asked for a little more patience. The POVs shifted several times within a single chapter. As the storylines took shape, they felt so separate that I wasn’t entirely convinced they would ever meet.
But once each character found their footing in my mind, the pages began to move faster. By the time I reached the end, I felt that familiar Picoult sensation. Like I’d been dreaming hard inside someone else’s world, and now that I’ve been pulled back into real life, I just want to go back to dreaming.
Second Glance settles into a small Vermont town where the past never quite stays buried, but the book doesn’t lean on that in a showy way. It moves between the present and the early 1900s, letting pieces of grief and old family history drift up as the story goes. There’s a ghost in the mix, but the heart of the book is really the people trying to make sense of what they’ve carried for years. A man circling the loss that shaped him. Relatives trying to understand choices made long before they were born. A town remembering things it once preferred not to look at.
Picoult lets the science, the folklore, and the moral questions build slowly, and by the time everything connects, it feels less like a twist and more like a long breath finally let out.
I thought of starting another Picoult, but a library book arrived that needed my attention. After finishing Alaska Sourdough, the biography of Slim Williams by Richard Morenus, I found myself chasing down bits of his story online. One search led to another, and suddenly I was reading about his first wife and her sister, who had written their own book about living off the land with him in the Copper River Valley.
First wife? I thought. There was no mention of anyone before the woman who becomes his wife and manager at the end of Sourdough. But Sisters: Coming of Age & Living Dangerously in the Wild Copper River Valley makes it clear that Aileen and Samme Gallaher spent real time with Williams in the great Alaskan interior. They recognize pieces of the stories told in the biography, but they also say some of it was fiction.
Their book is less about the legend of Slim Williams and more about what it felt like to be young women from the city learning to survive in a place that didn’t care one bit about their comfort. They write about hauling water from a river that changed moods by the hour, about nights when the cold pressed in so sharply it felt like a presence, about the strange mix of fear and exhilaration that comes from realizing you’re capable of more than you thought. Williams is a constant in their story, sometimes a guide, but also sometimes a reminder that the wilderness wasn’t the only thing they had to navigate.
I liked the book very much and wished there was more of it. It was heartbreaking to learn about the divorce and how quickly the partnership unraveled once the strain of the wilderness and the strain of Williams himself became too much to carry. I, too, became less enchanted (but not entirely disenchanted) with Williams when it came to how he treated some of the animals in his care in both stories.
I had promised a Roundup reader that I would read some William Kent Krueger. I believed I hadn’t read him before, which felt sacrilegious being a Minnesotan and all. I got a small stack of Kruegers at a rummage sale earlier this summer and grabbed This Tender Land for my next read.
I’m not going to talk about this book until I finish it, except to say this, because curious minds need to know. What do you do when you start reading a book and realize you’ve read it before?
Somewhere in the early chapters, I caught myself thinking, I know this. I knew how the story was moving, but I couldn’t remember where it landed. I debated, since my TBR list is as long as the queue at Betty’s Pies on a July Saturday, whether I should set it aside and pick up something new.
But I kept going. The story pulled me back in, and here I am, more than halfway through, completely committed. I still can’t remember how it ends. Why are book brains like this? This can’t be an isolated incident. What do you do, North Shore Reading Roundup readers, when the story feels familiar but you can’t place the ending?
Write to sarahwritesnsj@yahoo.com and tell me your reading déjà vu stories, your accidental rereads, your moments of recognition, and whether you keep going or start fresh. And if you’re giving this column a second glance, make sure you tell everyone and their sisters, because next time we’re heading into This Tender Land together and I’d love to hear what all of you are reading or rereading!
