The Housekeeper [Paperback]

Melanie Wallace (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2006

When Jamie Hall comes across a boy tied to a tree, she sets him free—and unwittingly unleashes a force of evil that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Set during a violent winter in the wilderness of a mountain-and-valley watershed area whose residents mirror the harshness of rural American life with lawless brutality, The Housekeeper is a tale of the past’s relentless grip. A teenage runaway whose only beloved possession is a dog, Jamie—entrapped by circumstance and poverty—becomes seemingly incapable of escaping the place where her maternal grandparents were born. An ancient postmaster lives through—and for—his memories of Jamie’s grandmother, the woman he loved who was never his. Margaret, the retired photographer who employs Jamie as a housekeeper, leaves behind a pictorial chronicle of the watershed’s history. And Galen, an ex-convict, finds himself confronted by everything he has tried to erase from his life when he and Jamie, whom he loves, are threatened by his childhood friend—now a murderous poacher—Harlan. The feral boy, malevolent yet uncomprehending of good or evil and obsessed with Jamie’s dog, obstinately trails her; Harlan—searching for the boy because of his relationship with a junkyard family who fears the boy because of the havoc he wreaks—comes to believe that Galen is protecting him; and Galen is left no choice but to find the boy himself. When he and Jamie return in a blizzard from the mountains, where they futilely attempted to track down the boy, they find that whatever life they might have had has been destroyed. They resolve to move on, to break away from the unremitting winter and Harlan’s violence, only to be halted in their tracks on the reservoir’s ice, where the boy and Harlan, Galen and a wounded deer, meet their fate as Jamie—her dog beside her, and upon a granite outcrop that is part of her past—helplessly looks on.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Wallace's second beautifully written novel (after Blue Horse Dreaming), the titular character is Jamie, a 17-year-old on the lam from being placed in a foster home after her mother's cancer death. She works for Margaret, an elderly photographer, in the small mill town Dyers Corner, where most residents are caught in a cycle of poverty and violence. Jamie arrives in the town, her grandparents' former home and her mother's birthplace, in search of her roots, but she becomes embroiled in a nasty debacle after she frees a disturbed young boy who was lashed to a tree. Wallace's prose is lush and spare ("unrepentant after his absences, unrepentant in drink, bridging with his body the chasms that lay between one unkindness and the next"), and she handles both the grotesque and the gorgeous with equal skill. A tender, tragic love story between Jamie and Galen, a trapper twice her age, together with a suspenseful pursuit story, brings the novel to a dramatic close. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novel would devolve into melodrama, but Wallace never lets its chilly, destitute atmosphere lapse. (Apr. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

After her mother dies, 17-year-old Jamie leaves home with her dog, "the only thing she had left in the world to love," and heads toward an isolated valley, several long hitchhikes away, that she visited as a child. Her sudden presence in what is left of that dying, desolate outpost sets off a bizarre chain of events that irrevocably changes her young life. Grimly determined to make it alone, Jamie assumes the role of housekeeper for Margaret, a photographer who gives her a place to stay. Jamie unwittingly sets free a mute and wild-eyed boy--the product of generations of inbreeding--whom she finds tied to their neighbor's tree. This small act opens old wounds of guilt and revenge between Galen, an ex-con who is smitten with Jamie, and Harlan, a bitter, sadistic loner and Galen's longtime nemesis. Wallace's prose is simultaneously dreamily poetic and harshly graphic as she evocatively paints the brutal winter landscape while building toward the preordained tragedy into which these downtrodden characters become helplessly drawn. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 290 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam/Cage; First Edition edition (April 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596921404
• ISBN-13: 978-1596921405
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,676,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting, starkly beautiful, and brilliant story, May 19, 2006

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Housekeeper (Paperback)

By the time she was 16, Jamie had lost everyone she loved. Hanging on desperately to her dog, she fled after her mother's death so that she could remain free of the social service/foster care system. Far more than a beloved pet, the dog was all Jamie had in the world, with the possible exception of her memories. She set out for Dyers Corner, the place she remembered as her grandparents' home. She wanted to see the reservoir that covered their house when the government flooded the valley.

When Jamie finally gets to Dyers Corner, she discovers that there isn't much to see there and the weather gets really ugly. However, having nowhere else to go, she decides to stick around a while. A little bit of good luck comes her way when Margaret, a savvy elderly woman, gives her a break --- and a job as housekeeper. But soon Margaret heads for warmer climes when the cold sets in, leaving Jamie once more on her own, haunting the post office almost daily for Margaret's payment.

Growing up hard and fast, Jamie clings almost fanatically to the dog, fearing abandonment every time he goes outside. But Jamie has to learn to trust. After choosing the wrong people for help too many times, she realizes that she must simply depend on herself. Unfortunately, not all of her decisions prove wise.

The dreary community of Dyers Corner seems populated solely by broken and damaged souls. If there are any happy, well-adjusted residents, Jamie certainly hasn't found them. She encounters only people with heavy, scarred baggage: a man burdened with a guilt he shouldn't claim; a man unfettered by a conscience he should have; a man carrying a torch for a long-dead woman; and an undeserving man who steals Jamie's love. And then there's the boy, who unravels her life.

The first time Jamie saw the boy, he was tied to a tree......
You should have left him there...
I did.
But you untied him.

That one innocent act of kindness leads to unimaginable horrors. As the townsfolk so aptly put it, the boy is not right in the head. Once freed from his bonds, he stalks Jamie, along with animals, family and anyone who crosses his path, littering the way with misery. If only she had known.

With the outcome so unpredictable, you may be tempted to rush ahead to find out what ultimately happens, but you can't. Ms. Wallace's writing is just too starkly beautiful. Take the time to savor her prose and relish the emotions; roll each sentence around in your head and visualize the pictures the carefully chosen words evoke. They are not all beautiful --- some even bordering on brutal --- but THE HOUSEKEEPER is a brilliant story of a period in a young girl's life memorable for its conflicts.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars (4.5) "I'm like him now. I'm among the missing.", April 9, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Housekeeper (Paperback)

Menace finds its way easily, rooting out the defenseless with eager eyes, uncovering the vulnerable. Jamie Hall is such a one, a girl who describes herself as "someone things just happen to". Setting off on foot after the death of her mother, an orphan with only her dog for a companion, Jamie has no one and belongs nowhere. With only her family history as a guide, Jamie heads for Dyers Corner, the only other place she has ever been, trekking across a chilly winter landscape to the place her grandparents were forced to leave by the government, who flooded their land with a reservoir, its icy surface belying the fact that people's histories are submerged in its watery depths.

It is 1976 and poverty is familiar to Jamie, who takes up little space and asks nothing she can't pay for, a few bills tucked in her pocket. Along the way, Jamie draws attention, her youthful beauty, her aloneness, save the dog at her side. Confronted with the barrenness around her, Jamie looks for shelter, accepting it from a married man who drinks too much and will leave her soon, finding temporary employment with Margaret, a photographer who has recorded the history of this place in pictures that line the walls of her home, traveling now, secure in the knowledge that Jamie is caring for her things.

When Jamie comes upon a boy tied to a tree, she sets him free, unleashing a series of events that bring with them the promise of malevolence, aggravating the somnolent men who are content to rage in private until one of them is interfered with, the pristine countryside in counterpoint to the seething menace of the boy's father and a local poacher. Jamie's only solace in this bitter land is Galen, a trapper who lives in isolation, content to avoid the past until Jamie needs his protection.

There are innocents: Jamie is one; the boy, made wild by a brutal father, now ranging across the hills in search of mischief; and the dog, a happy companion to those who treat him kindly. The opposing forces converge, innocent and guilty, crazed and calm, in stark relief against an unforgiving wilderness, where innocence has no place and violence thrives, while nature, indifferent, looks on. In lyrical prose familiar from Blue Horse Dreaming, Wallace delivers a powerful tale, a taut and seductive vision of poverty, loneliness and the cruelty bred of ignorance, one young girl walking through the heart of darkness, the devil snapping at her heels. Luan Gaines/ 2006.