In Bottomland, Michelle Hoover (The Quickening) tells the story of an immigrant family's experience in the Midwestern plains with empathy, understanding and an eye for detail.
Julius and Margrit Hess arrived in Iowa in the 1890s, determined to make their bottomland there support a family. Four daughters, two sons and years later, the story opens with Nan, the eldest child, straining to hold her household together following Margrit's death. The two youngest girls, Esther and Myrle, have disappeared in the night, from behind locked doors, leaving no note or sign of struggle. In the anti-German frenzy of World War I, the neighbors and townspeople began to harass the Hesses, and good relations have never been re-established. Nan and her siblings fear that this local animosity has finally culminated in the fate of the two girls.
Each of the Hesses is developed expertly, each dealing differently with the rock-hard and dirt-poor life they lead, with the prejudices of their neighbors, and, of course, with the missing girls, empty seats at the table and the question of food for the winter: "Hope, it was a terrible expense. We couldn't let anything go to waste. And we couldn't risk the extra we might set side only to spoil" if the girls did not return.
Hoover offers a lovely feat of exposition, bringing to life the immigrant experience, the hard work of homesteading, the deprivations and bigotries of the war years, and the workings of family, how its members cope and hold onto one another. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia