Prairie Fever

March 11, 2019
Parker (The Watery Part of the World) transports readers to the 19th-century Oklahoma frontier in this lovely story about the bond between two sisters. Elise and Lorena are inseparable, sharing everything as they come of age with absent and distracted parents in a small town. Elise is flighty and clever, always daydreaming and coming up with adventure stories that take them away from Oklahoma. Sixteen-year-old Lorena is intelligent and practical, keeping her younger sister’s education on track. But Lorena is almost finished with school and dreaming of her future, making Elise nervous that she will be left behind. Then Gus McQueen becomes the teacher at their rural school, and the girls are torn apart when both fall in love with him. After Gus proposes to Elise, the sisters go their separate ways: Lorena to college in Wyoming, Elise to Texas with Gus. During the novel’s second half, much of the narrative is delivered through correspondence between the sisters, revealing their regrets, mutual love, and longing for a different future. It’s only with time and forgiveness, slowly won through their letters, that the sisters reaffirm the bonds of their family. In the tradition of Katherine Ann Porter, Parker’s exceptional tale explores the power and strength of kinship on the harsh American frontier.

March 15, 2019
One man prompts two sisters to take divergent paths out of early-1900s Oklahoma.Winter, 1917: Fifteen-year-old Elise leaves her one-room schoolhouse during a blizzard and attempts to ride a horse to town to research a saloon shooting she's fixated on. She's rescued by her older sister, Lorena, who's used to Elise's peculiar flights of fancy. But the brief, ill-fated trek has extensive consequences: Elise loses half her toes and the tip of her nose, and both sisters are drawn closer to their teacher, Gus, who'll play a transforming role in both their lives. Parker's sixth novel (All I Have in This World, 2014, etc.) is a familiar hardscrabble frontier tale (the title illness claimed the sisters' two brothers), though it's enlivened by Elise's distracted, savantlike temperament, which allows her to memorize whole newspaper articles and predisposes her to impulsive horse rides and distracting reveries. ("Dreaming your dreamy dreams," as Lorena puts it.) Lorena, more practical and studious, escapes the homestead for college, with Gus seemingly interested in marrying her. But with Lorena away, Gus soon falls for Elise instead, and the sisters split, Elise for Texas, Lorena for Wyoming. Moving the narrative through 1940, Parker's novel isn't as much about sisterhood as love, as the two struggle to reckon with their estrangement head-on; some of the novel's most powerful sections are Elise's letters to Lorena, addressed not directly to sis but to the horse she rode during the blizzard. The two women's reconciliation is wan compared to the peculiarities that Parker introduces in the narrative, but the easygoing, sometimes-smirking nature of the prose (True Grit comes to mind) makes the novel a pleasant ride overall.A frontier tale of sibling rivalry that could use more of its entertainingly otherworldly touches.

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Starred review from March 1, 2019
Two sisters in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Oklahoma brave "coyote winds" to attend a country school, taught by a young man barely older and scarcely more educated than they are. Lenora is pretty and practical while Elise is dreamy and dramatic. They ride to school, blanket-bundled together, on their black horse, to whom Elise ascribes magical powers. On their snowy rides, they discuss their teacher, Gus McQueen, and argue about local incidents. After all, what else is there to do in this bleak and barren place? One argument propels Elise to seek answers in a blizzard, which maims her and threatens Lorena's and Gus' lives as well. Elise's rash action foments a chain of events that makes the teacher abruptly choose her over Lorena, and creates a decades-lasting rift between the sisters. As an older woman, Elise admits that she always knew the truths behind the romantic attributions she lent to her world. Parker's (The Watery Part of the World, 2011) chimerical slipstream of a novel asks, Is it better to hew to that which is, or to see the world as you wish? Readers will surely be pulled deep into the strange and wild river of Elise's fanciful peregrinations.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)