Critics' Opinion:
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Published Aug 2018
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A "riveting family saga" (Mary Karr), set in the American West, about sibling rivalry, dark secrets, and a young girl's struggle with freedom and artistic desire.
In the years after World War II, the bleak yet beautiful plains of South Dakota still embody all the contradictions - the ruggedness and the promise - of the old frontier. This is a place where you can eat strawberries from wild vines, where lightning reveals a boundless horizon, where descendants of white settlers and native Indians continue to collide, and where, for most, there are limited options.
René shares a home, a family, and a passion for dance with her older brother, Leon. Yet for all they have in common, their lives are on remarkably different paths. In contrast to René, a born spitfire, Leon is a gentle soul. The only boy in their ballet class, Leon silently endures often brutal teasing. Meanwhile, René excels at everything she touches, basking in the delighted gaze of their father, whom Leon seems to disappoint no matter how hard he tries.
As the years pass, René and Leon's parents fight with increasing frequency - and ferocity. Their father - a cattle broker - spends more time on the road, his sporadic homecomings both yearned for and dreaded by the children. And as René and Leon grow up, they grow apart. They grasp whatever they can to stay afloat - a word of praise, a grandmother's outstretched hand, the seductive attention of a stranger - as René works to save herself, crossing the border into a larger, more hopeful world, while Leon embarks on a path of despair and self-destruction.
Tender, searing, and unforgettable, The Distance Home is a profoundly American story spanning decades - a tale of haves and have-nots, of how our ideas of winning and losing, success and failure, lead us inevitably into various problems with empathy and caring for one another. It's a portrait of beauty and brutality in which the author's compassionate narration allows us to sympathize, in turn, with everyone involved.
"Starred Review. An exquisite, searing portrait of family and of people coping with whatever life throws at them while trying to keep close to one another." - Booklist
"Penetrating and insightful...This debut wonderfully depicts the entire lifespan of a singular family." - Publishers Weekly
"Drawing on Saunders's own family history, this debut novel captures the underlying turmoil of a dysfunctional family at war with themselves while hiding secrets from their past. The author's compassion for her characters shines through in this honest story." - Library Journal
"A grim, haunting parable of split child-rearing in which the dark blots out much of the light." - Kirkus
"A family's story - its past, its present, and (most surprising) its future - traces the intricate, often subterranean lines that connect damage to redemption, creation to dissolution, and the everyday to the eternal, just to name several of its moving and startling aspects." - Michael Cunningham
The Distance Home is a bracing and beautiful novel about a fierce struggle for love and understanding in a South Dakota family, and about aspiration (both thwarted and encouraged) in an unforgiving place. Read it - it will break your heart and open it up." - Maile Meloy, author of Do Not Become Alarmed
"The Distance Home is a deeply involving portrait of the American postwar family: its promises and disruptions - surrounded by a rich, shimmering, sensuous South Dakota landscape." - Jennifer Egan
"Set in the isolation of South Dakota prairie towns and then the provincialism of Rapid City, The Distance Home is an exemplary story of what hardworking people suffered in Middle America in the late twentieth century while striving to achieve dreams. This soul-searching first novel offers everywhere that most mysterious and essential of artistic achievements: heart." - Douglas Unger, author of Leaving the Land and Voices from Silence
"An extraordinary debut. Paula Saunders writes beautiful, evocative prose that engages you in every aspect of this world. The Distance Home is heartbreaking and full of compassion while also managing to be exacting, precise, and truthful." - Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others and Stone Arabia
This information about The Distance Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paula Saunders grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She danced as an apprentice with the Harkness Ballet in New York City under the direction of David Howard. She is a graduate of Barnard College, as well as the Syracuse University creative writing program, and was awarded a post-graduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer chair Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.
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