breach

by Karin Anderson

Fiction. The Andersons are a hardtack sort, built from gravel and loam and the echoes of Brigham Young's voice shot out from the canyons. But the sermons do not land clearly. Instead we watch as Karin vacillates between intellectual and pioneer woman, Latter-day Saint and woman veering toward outer darkness. She marries and starts a family. With her husband growing more and more distant, even perversely hostile, they tumble together, wits against arms, for a better foothold at the base of the Wasatch Range.

346 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2013

About the author

After a magical Utah childhood (horses, mountains, apple trees), Karin Anderson still managed to overcomplicate her adult relationship to home roots. Utahn to the worrisome core, she came of age in the season of Cold War, Watergate, Ted Bundy, Gary Gilmore, the Sagebrush Rebellion, and organized community resistance to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Currently, Karin Anderson resides in Salt Lake City, the place her grown children call home even while they scatter toward their own futures. For this author, writing is a deliberate, possibly reverential, mapping of the stratified landscapes of cultural memory.

Reviews

[Jessie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an amazing read for me. The language is beautiful and the vignettes were painfully timely in their reflection of my own experiences. It was also a voyeuristic guilty pleasure to step inside the mind and life of my college mentor. I have met most of the characters in the book and was embarrassed at how torn I felt about peering into their world. I felt like a teenaged boy in a co-ed dressing room, simultaneously desperate for more detail but convinced that I should look away.

[Aubrey Hales-Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book...but I'm biased, I know the author! She was my college mentor and an incredible person.