In her debut novel, Call Me Home, Megan Kruse undertakes sprawling topics including guilt, sex, domestic violence and the complicated love of siblings, parents, children and lovers. These ambitious themes and clearly wrought characters are gorgeously rendered in feeling prose.
Amy moved from small-town Texas to small-town Washington State as an 18-year-old newlywed, before her husband began to beat her. The action of Call Me Home begins years later, alternately told in the third-person perspectives of Amy and her son, Jackson, and in first person by Jackson's little sister, Lydia. Amy tries to leave with her children, repeatedly, but to escape her abusive husband permanently she has to choose just one child to save--Lydia. Thus 18-year-old Jackson finds himself on the streets of Portland, Ore., before taking work on a construction crew in Idaho. Amy and Lydia hide out at a shelter in New Mexico, then find their way to Amy's hometown, where 13-year-old Lydia meets her grandmother for the first time. Flashbacks throughout the narrative also portray Amy's marriage and abuse and the children's early lives.
Call Me Home offers lovely descriptions of natural settings in Washington, Idaho and Texas, but central are the powerful themes and ugly realities of domestic violence, Jackson's challenges as a gay teen, and the shared traumas of Amy, Lydia and Jackson. Kruse's evocative, often lyrical language serves her subjects well, so that what results is not unleavened pain but painful beauty, even hope. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia