Juniper Tree Burning: A Novel [Hardcover]

Goldberry Long (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2001

This masterful debut is an inventive, magnetic exploration of identity and memory amidst the vast western landscape: the first novel to capture the unadulterated legacy of the 1960s counterculture as it is lived three decades later. Juniper Tree Burning hates her name. It represents all she despises: her hippie mother, Faith, and meandering father, Ray, who she can't possibly please; her sick baby brother, Sunny Boy Blue, who she can't possibly save; and the raw poverty of her parents' 'back to nature' New Mexican home. Juniper escapes them all, to turn herself into someone new: Jennie. Jennie becomes a fierce, intelligent woman who refuses to be trapped by anything or anyone, even her seemingly perfect new husband can't get too close. Then one night the police call - Sunny has leaped off a Seattle ferry. 'Abducting' her best friend, Jennie flees New Mexico for Seattle, retracing the final steps of her brother, and the same path travelled by generations of her family. Along the way, Jennie confronts the familial tapestry of betrayal and loss, stories she has rejected or embraced as she created her new self. Only by reconsidering this history can Jennie face her anger and grief, her guilt at her brother's suicide, and her own greatest challenge, accepting love.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Juniper Tree Burning is the name Ray and Faith Davis give their infant girl when she's already several months old. Juniper Tree Burning is also the name of Goldberry M. Long's debut, a novel full of images so luminous they have the force and presence of characters: cracked adobe walls, spiders, pianos, overripe apricots, ferns. Looking back, the eponymous narrator concludes that the fierce cry her parents took for assent to her new name was actually a scream of protest: "Out there on the mesa, dazzled by sun and bright sky, they give their daughter the name she tells them she was born for: Juniper Tree Burning. But this is not my name, and this is not my story."

Everything about the name is a mistake from the start. Even the tree her parents intended to celebrate--one that reminds them of the burning bush in the Bible--turns out to be no juniper at all, but a piñon pine. Later, young Juniper rechristens herself in secret: she chooses Jennifer Davis, a normal name for a normal girl. Jennie becomes the strong, fearless woman, the one who shoots pool and manipulates men, who puts herself through school and is going to become a doctor. But always, inside, she's haunted by Juniper the hippie kid, the one who wears clothes from the free box behind the co-op and suffers under the social burden of head lice and an outdoor toilet.

When Jennie's brother Sunny Boy Blue ends his life in the waters of Puget Sound, her precarious grip on normality crumbles. She flees her saintly husband, Chris, kidnaps her best friend, Sarah, and sets out in a junker Ford truck to re-create her sibling's last days--and her own family's flight from the Northwest to New Mexico. Long intersperses this quixotic journey with long, dreamlike scenes from the protagonist's childhood, and in many ways, it's hard not to prefer the latter. The grown-up Jennie is one tough, angry cookie, and she defies our sympathy as stubbornly as Chris's love. But Juniper Tree Burning is not just a book about growing up the child of hippies; it's a book about growing up the child of anyone who meant to do well and didn't. Jennie's story will resonate with anyone who's yearned to run away from an old self and found it trailing behind them--infuriating, embarrassing, infantile, cruel. --Chloe Byrne

From Publishers Weekly

How would you like it if your name were Juniper Tree Burning? Well, neither does the heroine of Long's stunningly assured, deeply affecting debut. Trying to leave her less than idyllic hippie upbringing behind, brash and blunt Juniper has renamed herself Jennie. But at her wedding, her past resurfaces in the form of her younger brother, Sunny Boy Blue, who behaves abominably even kidnapping her from the reception. Jennie refuses to forgive him, but when she receives word that he's jumped to his death from a ferry, guilt takes over and she abandons her new husband (she's had trouble letting him get close to her anyway) to follow Sunny's final footsteps from New Mexico to Seattle, hoping to find answers. For good measure, she kidnaps her friend Sarah, who's having problems with her fianc‚, and brings her along. How much of our history can be abandoned, and how much must be accepted? Jennie, a troubled young woman who has always believed that fate landed her in the wrong place with the wrong people, seeks to answer these questions as she copes with her feelings of responsibility for a brother whose birth circumstances (breech) and general disposition (disturbed) earned him the nickname "Backwards Boy." Moving seamlessly between past and present, first person and third, Long exquisitely mines the bitter themes of guilt, resentment and dashed hopes, depicting the desperate search for normalcy and the valiant spirit needed to pursue the quest. Anyone who has ever been a prickly pear, or loved one, will identify with this sheer wonder of a heroine. Agent, Jane Dystel.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1St Edition edition (June 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743202031
• ISBN-13: 978-0743202039
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,855,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sister's View, March 24, 2002

By 

Keja L. Beeson (Brawley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Juniper Tree Burning: A Novel (Hardcover)

I had the pleasure of hearing the prologue to this effective novel read to me by Goldberry many years ago at Christmas time. It was so beautiful, I cried. My mother had to leave the room; she didn't like the idea that the youngest in the Davis family killed himself. We have a young brother, who at 24 was still the baby. I think Mom was afraid of the possible prophetic effects of the words. Even today, I don't think Mom has finished the novel; too close to home.

Jennie Braverman, formerly Juniper Tree Burning Davis, doesn't have the luxury of leaving the room or closing the book. Sunny Boy Blue is dead. This is her reality and she can't hide anymore. This death sends her on a quest to come to find the answer to the question of who she really is, and to come to terms with the influence she has had (and is still having) on the people in her life and theirs on her.

In the manuscript, Goldberry told many stories from all the generations that influenced Jennie's current behavior: stories of the grandmother she never knew, the mother she never knew, and the Jennie she never knew. I laughed and cried aloud, and as I did, the words became my reality. Memories of my grandmother and her relationship with my mom were suddenly vivid. The fact that they are fictitious doesn't bother me; these are cathartic memories all the same, ones that help me understand my own behaviors.

The novel is pared down from the manuscript: trimmed for printing and sale. (Have you ever bought an 800 plus page novel?) I miss the stories that didn't make it into the book. But the journey that remains, in memory, fantasy and reality is focused on giving Jennie (and the reader) the answers sought.

This is a wonderful novel, written by someone with a wealth of knowledge and advice, and who is sharing but a smidgen of it with the lucky reader who experiences it.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Splendid Debut, June 24, 2001

By 

Pam Hanna "wind star" (Thoreau, New Mexico United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Juniper Tree Burning: A Novel (Hardcover)

I don't believe we really know what we were all about as a generation until our children tell us what it was like for them. Why did we choose voluntary poverty? Why did we choose to live among and be instructed by Indians? Why did we bake our own bread, learn about herbal medicine, and live with outhouses, without running water? Why did we give birth to our children at home and why did we name them after the flora and fauna of the places where we were? Names like Cedar, Sage, Juniper, Coyote, Sunflower, Chamisa? Names like Goldberry? Lady Goldberry was a golden girl in the Tolkein Trilogy, *Lord of the Rings* which we had all read. We were living in a fantasy, to be sure, but who is to say that our fantasy was not lovelier, lighter, and more compassionate than the fantasies of the '50s in which we'd grown up - except our children.

*JUniper Tree Burning* is in novel form, but it tells the truth about our generation as well as the author's generation. "You need not tell all the truth, unless to those who have a right to know it all," said Horace Mann, "but let all you tell be truth." Ms. Long has succeeded admirably in telling the truth about her own slice of space-time from the '60s on to the present.

The book is deeply psychological and intensely autobiographical even though circumstances, events and characters are altered by the magic of a sure novelist's art. The author changes only the closest geographical names, for instance, but accurately portrays the life and landscape of Arroyo Hondo, Taos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque. She changes names and edits events, but you hear Goldberry being told that "you don't think - you just barge ahead like the Capricorn you are" - her mom's self-fulfilling prophecy. You can see her hiding beind her own face. "It's a good trick to have. You turn your face into a mask and then you are safe behind it, especially when your mother calls you a stupid name which is not yours, and which you hate."

And you look into the eyes of Juniper/Jennifer/Goldberry's father and brother - "pale green, so light they almost seem transparent. See-through eyes I've always called them." But you could easily read the whole book and not have a clue that the god-medicine, the sacred host of the Meeting Way - is peyote. The word is never mentioned, because it does not need to be mentioned in the interests of truth.

The truth is, "That's how to be a woman. You cook for a hundred people on Christmas Day." The truth is in "the confusion of loving and hating, leaving and arriving, leaving and arriving, like the ocean, the tide, the waves." The truth is that "...he'll never be a woodsman in the forest who saves the children. That is why he is so sad." The truth is contained in the very real problems and persecution the little hippie kids experienced from both teachers and students in Northern New Mexico at the time. (I know. My own children suffered similarly.)

The truth is in Ms. Long's self-awareness. Her alter-ego, Juniper, got into a private school on scholarship, "by hawking my sordid past, making it seem tragic and lovely, and painting big idealisitc plans for the future...because you tell the part of the truth that gets you what you need. You make them believe they should be astonished." And she knows what she's doing. "You can't have it both ways, you teenage monsters. You don't get to act like you know everything and then cry, But I didn't know!"

Reading the first half of this book, I was struck by how the author skillfully uses various literary devices - moving fluidly between third and first person for instance (you never have to go back as you do in a Russian novel to figure out who is saying what). I marveled at the lyricism, the true voices in her dialogue, and the penetrating psychological insights. I felt a fair amount of generational pride. This girl - this incredible young woman - can really write! Having been so dismayed by so many children-of-the-'60s and children-of-the-children-of-the-'60s stories that capitaize on half-truths and downright lies - this was a breath of fresh air. And not only that - it's honest-to-god literature!

But then, I became caught up in the STORY - and read it in immense gulps right through to the very moving and redemptive end. It made me cry (and I'm a tough old bird - not much can make me tear up like this). Goldberry was able to appreciate her family - the parents who taught her how to live on the land. "I will say to my father and mother, I think I understand. You did your best. You loved this valley, nestled into the mesa." They taught her so much and gave her so much of themselves, and the love that shines through all this is dazzling. Redemptive. The fact that she kept her name, Goldberry, speaks volumes.

This is a splendid first novel by a mature and insightful young woman who knows whereof she speaks and doesn't tell lies to pander to any literary styles or expectations. Critics have said that it's too long, but I maintain that not a single word is wasted. Even if you're going into it cold - not knowing anything at all about the space-time coordinates of the story - its appeal is universal. That's the mark of great writing by a master craftsman and artist. Bravo Goldberry! Keep on keeping on. May you live LONG and prosper.

...

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another All-Night Read, July 13, 2001

By 

Sara Chamberlin (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Juniper Tree Burning: A Novel (Hardcover)

Juniper Tree Burning is one of those books that I hesitate to praise too much because it is so good, so courageously told--and I don't just mean the subject matter, which includes a poverty-striken childhood among hippies, suicide, and a not-entirely likable main character--but the literal telling of it. Ms. Long weaves back and forth in time masterfully, gradually revealing the reality behind the half-truths that Jennie, the former Juniper Tree Burning, the self-named Ugly Chick, has told us with more than a mere glaze of rosy glasses. The story also blends points-of-view, sometimes in Jennie's own voice, in a third-person storyteller, and often in a stepped-back voice of Jennie, admittedly speaking of herself from the outside.

This is, at its most essential, a book with a beating heart. Let this complicated woman into your life--watch her play pool as a bloodsport, let her husband finally pierce her toughness with how lovingly he makes guacamole for her, and weep for the determined resilence of the young Juniper Tree Burning struggling to make breakfast before school--you will not soon forget her, and her many journeys through these pages.