Gabrielle Bissonette, a hunter, is a character of uncommon depth and determination. Her way of life intrudes upon what has traditionally been male territory. Rickey Gard Diamond creates an extraordinary heroine, one who redefines what it means to be fully human. She has the strength and courage to discover "second sight, " reclaiming painful memories, and seeing them anew in her quest for both responsibility and new direction. Gabrielle returns us to 1973, when family violence was still largely unchallenged, and Vietnam's violence was radically dividing American families and communities. Like today, it was a time of changing perceptions, with sexual and economic differences, power, knowledge and the environment at stake. Gabrielle struggles to untangle her ten-year silence. Her story is complex, woven of many threads. Caught in a web of violence, along with her older brother, Robert, and Valley, his young bride, she wrestles with memories of hunting and vegetarianism, the nature of violence and definitions of victim, the links between local storytelling and literature, between rural and academic dialects, the impact of Ernest Hemingway's work versus the invisibility of women's.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Diamond's impressive first novel travels from a meditative beginning to a startlingly violent end with admirable confidence. In 1973, Gabrielle (Gabe) Bissonette is writing her master's thesis on Hemingway's failed masculinity while living in a cabin in Hemingway's beloved woods, on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The cabin belongs to Gabe's father, Henry, now hospitalized after a stroke has left him unable to speak. When Valley, the precocious, uneducated flower-child wife of Gabe's murderous brother Robert, arrives in a snowstorm, Gabe reluctantly takes her in, and the younger woman teaches her introspective host how to lead a more earthy life. Valley has come to the Upper Peninsula to await Robert's release from prison; when he eventually arrives in a whirlwind of sociopathic machismo, Robert proceeds to violate his parole restrictions and to terrorize his wife and relatives. Diamond relies on vivid contrasts and extremes: Gabe's scholarly impulses against Robert's destructive magnetism; the sublime wilderness, with its wild bears and fierce blizzards, against the deceptively simple people who toil at its margins. She depicts these tensions in a series of controlled vignettes; the narrative sounds like an edgy, ill-tempered comedy of manners right up until its searing and hair-rising end. Into this tense and terse third-person narrative, Diamond interpolates Gabe's letters and reminiscences; some of these delve so deeply and explicitly into Gabe's reactions that readers feel spoon-fed. But if Diamond's narrative stratagems don't always catch fire, her plot and her characters certainly do; these complex figures, and their suspenseful, tragic interactions, are the progeny of a mature sensibility, by turns laconic, wary and lyrical.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This earnest first novel about the effects of violence on women is unnecessarily complicated by a plot device that leaves the reader hovering uncomfortably between decades. Through her journal entries from the 1980s, Gabrielle Bissonette relives the events that shattered her life ten years before. Gabe grew up in a house in Michigan's Upper Peninsula dominated by the memory of a mother who abandoned the family, a silent father, and Robert, her brilliant, troubled brother, whose alternating acts of cruelty and kindness uneasily marked Gabe's childhood. After a failed marriage Gabe has returned home, looking forward to a quiet life studying Hemingway for her graduate degree, visiting her father in a nursing home, and deer hunting. However, Robert, now in prison, sends his new wife, Valley, to stay with Gabe. The tentative friendship the two women develop is deepened after Robert's release from jail, when they both must cope with his increasing instability and violent behavior. The novel's conclusion is as sad and inevitable as a Greek tragedy. Recommended for public libraries.?Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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This is a question!,
By Jana E. Pellusch (Bella Vista, AR USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Second Sight (Paperback)
What I want to tell you is this:Your information page on this book lists a review in Library Journal of August 1, 1997. I have searched my copy of that issue and do not find the review, or a reference to it in the index. Would you please check on this? If there is a LJ review, I would like to know the correct date. Thank you.
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