Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, who has never wanted more than the land she works and the animals she raises on it with her husband, Frank. But for the deeply religious Mary, farming is an awkward living and at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher. She is the first to befriend Eddie in a relationship that will prove as rugged as the ground they walk on. Despite having little in common, Eddie and Mary need one another for survival and companionship. But as the Great Depression threatens, the delicate balance of their reliance on one another tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, exposing the dark secrets they hide from one another, and triggering a series of disquieting events that threatens to unravel not only their friendship but their families as well.
In this luminous and unforgettable debut, Michelle Hoover explores the polarization of the human soul in times of hardship and the instinctual drive for self-preservation by whatever means necessary. The Quickening stands as a novel of lyrical precision and historical consequence, reflecting the resilience and sacrifices required even now in our modern troubled times.
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"Hoover's tale of two women wrangling an existence out of the Iowa prairie in the years before the Depression is reminiscent of both Willa Cather and William Faulkner. I have been waiting for a writer to create fiction about Midwesterners that transfered Gothic themes from their usual perch in a rotting Southern house to a cabin on a windswept prairie. Hoover advances the pioneer tale genre with her unsparing descriptions of the tragedies and burdens of the women's lives. The men, one quiet, one occasionally violent, never become caricatures, but reflect the kinds of behavior patterns that would become rutted in the kinds of personalities that could survive the lashings of each season. Hoover uses real events of the era to show how neighbor relations and community justice evolved as the country began changing its relationship with farmers. This plays out against the whispered intimacies that the two women, bound more by what time and pregnancy do to their bodies than actual friendship, must exchange as the prairie howls over them and the doctor must be summoned from town."
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Carol (4 out of 5 stars)