Crossing the Great Divide

By Nancy Roberts

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1893239381
• ISBN13: 9781893239388
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Wind Pubns
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.5" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A rare find

Were I a better writer myself I could do justice to a review of this fine book. I am sorry it is not better known. It came to my attention through another reader. What writing!! Open to any page: "Climb one of these mountains . . . and you get to eat the world alive: the tang of fir and sagebrush, the salt of the big lake, the spun-sugar clouds spread wide by the sticky fingers of angels; take in, even, the groaning platter of the desert far to the south . . . " Or: "He pretended at first not to know what I was talking about, made those round eyes that had gotten him everything in life." Or: "Time is not something we think about. What we measure is the angle of our bodies against the rock, the intake of breath as we commit our weight to another toehold, another curl of fingertips around the slippery edge of a crack." And ... "We are strung out on the rope across the ice-coated ridge like beads on a rosary." The characters are, in every instance but one, unhappy people. They expect to be loved and understood forever, and they are not, so they leave - migrate, like birds - in one way or another. The at first puzzling interweaving of their stories led me to the enjoyment of making notes, who's telling what story, and so on, until I could keep track. I recognized my own generation: the one that intended in the 60s and 70s to save the world, but discovered that saving oneself intervened. It is modern, Hemingway-esque story-telling, since the people don't change, really, but only go deeper into themselves, seeking salvation in their art, their mountain climbing, their bird watching, their dogs and horses. There is abuse, there is illness, death, suicide, desertion. The child caught at my heart. The suicide caught at my heart. There is, in the end, a bit of hope: the neighbor, with "hair the color of Navaho sandstone." And Lily's "seventh thing". One likes these people, these lost people. They are not, as the first reviewer said, forgotten. Weeks later, one is still thinking about them. I keep going back to the book to savor phrases, descriptions. I hope Ms Roberts will continue to write for us.

I cried on several occasions

Confession: I don't read much "pure literature," leaning more toward escapist thrillers than the worthwhile stuff. And I never read short stories. But I did read this book and am amazed that, over a year later, the characters remain with me. It's a series of short stories involving people who are in various ways related; minor characters in one story show up as principles of a later story. And what characters! I found myself aching with them, and crying with them, and longing with them. I have to tell you that I have a mind like a sieve, and on many occasions have begun reading one of my standard thrillers only to discover, as much as halfway through, that I had read it before--but I still had no idea what was going to happen. It's important to establish my bona fides as an obscenely forgetful person--for one story in Crossing the Great Divide was so moving that I recall almost every detail, and occasionally am still haunted by the feelings I experienced upon reading it. It's a simple tale of a woman whose vehicle, towing a horse trailer, breaks down on the high plains, and she is invited by a kind stranger to stay with him and his daughter at their farm. But we learn dark things about the man and his daughter, and our hearts are broken by the end of these few pages. Roberts's ability to create characters largely through dialog is incredible. After finishing the book, you want to reread it in order to more firmly establish exactly how these people's lives are entangled. The settings add to the delight in getting to know the people--there are mountains, plains, and wild areas, and the stories often include horses--not just as backdrops, but as integral "characters" in the stories because of the people's deep relationship with them. And the wild, appealing settings are very important to the success of these stories: there is a great deal of pain in these people's lives, and setting the pain in the midst of natural beauty makes it more palatable. Read this book!