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2000s: How far would you go to belong?
2000s: How far would you go to belong?
Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in an ex-commune beside a lake in the beautiful, austere backwoods of northern Minnesota. The other girls at school call Linda ‘Freak’, or ‘Commie’. Her parents mostly leave her to her own devices, whilst the other inhabitants have grown up and moved on.
So when the perfect family – mother, father and their little boy, Paul – move into the cabin across the lake, Linda insinuates her way into their orbit. She begins to babysit Paul and feels welcome, that she finally has a place to belong.
Yet something isn’t right. Drawn into secrets she doesn’t understand, Linda must make a choice. But how can a girl with no real knowledge of the world understand what the consequences will be?
The stark and harsh beauty of the Minnesota woods and landscape is clear, claustrophobic and the sense of place palpable. Children canoe here as well as cycle, in this place which is snowbound in winter. However the stifling heat and mosquitoes in summer create a different sense of entrapment.
“In winter, the trees against the orange sky looked like veins. The sky between the branches looked like sunburn.”
“Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt down, exhausted, and stayed.”
(Readers should note however that the furry creatures if the title don’t actually feature in the book.)
“We didn’t have the resort back then, only a seedy motel. downtown went: Diner, hardware, bait and tackle, bank. The most impressive place in Loose River back then was the old timber mill, I think, and that was because it was half burned down, charred black planks towering over the bank of the river, Almost everything official, the hospital ….. were twenty miles down the road in Whitewood.”
Destination: Minnesota Author/Guide: Emily Fridlund Departure Time: 2000s
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