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Cold Country
Before Fleur’s desperate phone call, Sandra was all set to move south to escape her family, her ex-boyfriend and the wet Seattle weather. But now Fleur has broken her arm and needs a ride home immediately - no ques-tions asked. Tricked into agreeing, Sandra reluctantly sets out on the trip. Fleur is sullen and withdrawn, not like her breezy old self at all. Perhaps the answer to her odd behavior will come from her family in Fairbanks. But from Fleur’s sly brother Ryan, to her watchful sister Miriam, the Cold Country seems to have bred a family of misfits, full of guilt and guilty secrets just waiting to be revealed. As the Fairbanks winter closes in around them all, Sandra discovers that her journey has only just begun.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 20, 2007
Good read when I miss Fairbanks. Snaps me right the fuck out of it.
December 10, 2017
Cold Country by Gerri Brightwell
This is the story of what happens to people who make no plans for themselves. “Vacuums are dangerous: they suck everything towards them,” Brightwell opens her novel. “You let the pressure in your life drop and the next thing you know it's filling up with dumb ideas, other people's plans, the sort of debris that comes loose because it's not nailed down.” Brightwell's protagonist, Sandra, seems to have a plan – to go to Arizona – but it's a poorly planned plan and she gets shanghaied into a godawful road trip to Fairbanks from Seattle with a relative of her mother's second husband, a woman she doesn't particularly get along with. By contrast, this woman, Fleur, came to Seattle with a solid plan but it somehow exploded into pieces for a reason we don't discover until the end of the novel, and her formerly well-ordered life is jostled and mixed up until she is forced to be driven to Fairbanks by Sandra, whom she both depends on and resents. We experience the web of Fleur's and Sandra's families – nested dolls of obligation and resentment. Sandra becomes stranded in Alaska. She takes odd jobs waitressing and jobs illustrating (she is a graphic artist). In a wonderful scene, Brightwell has her creating seasonal cards for tourists to buy, as the seasons turn their pages in Sandra's real life, August becoming September, summer abruptly becoming winter. With her maxed out credit card and inappropriate lower-48 clothing, Sandra becomes more and more dependent on Fleur's family and is forced to learn to survive in the cabin she stays in with Fleur until she has money to leave: “Twice a week we had to go to the launderette to fill up, wash our clothes, use the showers, and in-between time had to take care that the bucket under the sink full of stinking waste water didn't get too full and run out onto the carpet. That was Alaska, not the ravens and moose and caribou I was painting.”
Things come to a head at Thanksgiving, Sandra's frustration escalates, family secrets seep out like the stinking waste water (a phrase of Sandra's we read more than once in the novel is “I hadn't meant for it to come out, but there it was”). There is so much tension, I feared a denouement like in Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence. I read Cold Country in one evening.
This is the story of what happens to people who make no plans for themselves. “Vacuums are dangerous: they suck everything towards them,” Brightwell opens her novel. “You let the pressure in your life drop and the next thing you know it's filling up with dumb ideas, other people's plans, the sort of debris that comes loose because it's not nailed down.” Brightwell's protagonist, Sandra, seems to have a plan – to go to Arizona – but it's a poorly planned plan and she gets shanghaied into a godawful road trip to Fairbanks from Seattle with a relative of her mother's second husband, a woman she doesn't particularly get along with. By contrast, this woman, Fleur, came to Seattle with a solid plan but it somehow exploded into pieces for a reason we don't discover until the end of the novel, and her formerly well-ordered life is jostled and mixed up until she is forced to be driven to Fairbanks by Sandra, whom she both depends on and resents. We experience the web of Fleur's and Sandra's families – nested dolls of obligation and resentment. Sandra becomes stranded in Alaska. She takes odd jobs waitressing and jobs illustrating (she is a graphic artist). In a wonderful scene, Brightwell has her creating seasonal cards for tourists to buy, as the seasons turn their pages in Sandra's real life, August becoming September, summer abruptly becoming winter. With her maxed out credit card and inappropriate lower-48 clothing, Sandra becomes more and more dependent on Fleur's family and is forced to learn to survive in the cabin she stays in with Fleur until she has money to leave: “Twice a week we had to go to the launderette to fill up, wash our clothes, use the showers, and in-between time had to take care that the bucket under the sink full of stinking waste water didn't get too full and run out onto the carpet. That was Alaska, not the ravens and moose and caribou I was painting.”
Things come to a head at Thanksgiving, Sandra's frustration escalates, family secrets seep out like the stinking waste water (a phrase of Sandra's we read more than once in the novel is “I hadn't meant for it to come out, but there it was”). There is so much tension, I feared a denouement like in Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Violence. I read Cold Country in one evening.
November 3, 2021
It was a good read. I was hesitant to start it but after some pages I was transported to the story. The settings, conversations, situations were believeable and relatable. A nice read for a lazy weekend with a cup of hot cocoa.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews