Review: When the Water Meets the Sky

4.3 So beautiful and lyrical. I love a coming-of-age story and this one is so introspective and philosophical (with a lot of great lines to note). Some will see it as a slow, but to me it was like a warm summer's long day.

She is on the verge of adulthood and looking back at her childhood there is only loss, grief, sadness, and love that she feels that she is not deserving of. She can't remember if she is responsible for the fire and the slow contemplation of summer quiet days (we can feel and hear the summer sounds) leads to crespucular understanding and revelation. A transition connected to nature, the nature of people who believe in her. A very emotional way of leaving the past behind.

This book will be released by Simon & Schuster. See here the official site.

About The Book

For fans of Tell Me Everything and Heartwood, Where the Water Meets the Sky is the story of a brave young woman seeking wholeness and love in the untamed forests of Michigan’s upper peninsula—and answers about a fire that took away everything.

"On a night in January, on the Garden Peninsula of Michigan, a farmhouse burns to the ground. A young child makes it out and flees into the woods with a book of matches in her hand.

Ten years later, Abby, a lover of birds and the natural world, returns to Garden, to the woods and lakes and farms and fisheries of her childhood, to assist her uncle on an environmental study of trees. Her best friend, Brew, invites her to a party where she meets a troubled girl named Seda, on the run from her abusive ex. Abby sets out to protect Seda and introduces her to an abandoned cabin that becomes a sanctuary for them both. Here, Abby begins to process her unrequited feelings for Brew while also discovering the person she is becoming. She wants more for her life, a hunger both spiritual and physical, and seeks to understand the trauma of her childhood that took her mother from her. Abby cares deeply for the people and flora and fauna around her and identifies with the wounds of the environment. She is desperate to remember what happened the night of the fire and as the summer of 1996 unfolds, Abby will be forced to reckon with the truth.

Perfect for fans of the lush and tender nature writing of Helen Macdonald and Richard Powers, Where the Water Meets the Sky is a coming-of-age novel that expertly delves into the connection between our perception of ourselves and our natural environs. It is a paean to the vast and beautiful wildscape around us and to the power of community and the wisdom of love."

Chapter 1

1

"ABBY DROVE OUT THE MICHIGAN highway that early June morning and across the UP to begin her summer. Mostly she headed east, among fields and farms and summer places, and stretches of state forest, past children on bicycles, boats on trailers, pickup trucks and gun racks, bunches of houses and then hardly anything at all.

June can still feel like spring on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The maples are covered in purple and red buds, like an impressionistic painting; the tips of the jack pine and white pine are as bright as the flesh of a kiwi; the birch trees with their silver-white trunks shimmer with new leaves.

In the community of Vans Harbor, nine miles down the western side of the Garden Peninsula, a young man, already eighteen, carries a handling tray of whitefish on ice—maybe a hundred pounds, he thinks—and brings it over to the forklift, T-shirt sleeves blowing in the wind, oiler draped over his chest and thighs, tall rubber boots. He sets the tray down on the pallet, then turns to retrieve another tray from one of the local fishermen. Banter passes back and forth between them—the conditions of the water and wind, the nets pulled up south of Round Island and Burnt Bluff, the size of their catch. Noon sun bakes down from a milky, blue sky; gulls swoop and squawk and light on nearby pilings. There’s the waft of gasoline from the boats, the glistening of fish scales like confetti spread over the concrete dock, the feathers of gulls and piping plovers and mallards and cormorants floating among driftwood and limestone cobble on the shore.

Abby parks beside a flatbed truck and gets out, walks into the tall grass and around the side of the fish house. She stands beside a cluster of birch trees and looks beyond the trees, past the brambles and beach grass and pallets stacked six feet tall, through sunlight reflecting off the water and the metal siding of the building. She brushes hair away from her face, tucks flyaway strands over her ears, a smile lifting her cheeks, her eyes soft.

Brew’s back is angled toward her, hands now in his pockets, a ball cap pulled low over his forehead, arms already golden brown. She hears his laugh. The fish trays have been rinsed. Two fishermen are loading them onto a large boat made of steel. Brew turns to open the back door of the fish house and steps inside.

Abby calls his name, but the fishermen have started their engine. The boat is pulling away. Brew doesn’t hear her.

She turns from the trees and extends her stride back through the tall grass, burrs sticking to her jeans, moves once more around the corner of the building, her body mostly hidden behind her car and the flatbed truck. She sees Brew leave out the front door, that pause and roll of his shoulders, and beyond Brew a young woman leaning against a blue pickup truck, legs crossed in front of her, smile on her face, hair braided off to the side. Brew stands in front of the woman now, their hands reaching for one another. He walks around the woman’s truck to the passenger side and gets in, windows down, voices from inside the cab. The truck backs out and they pull away.

The Garden Peninsula is a twenty-two-mile-long finger of land, sandwiched between Big Bay de Noc to its west and Lake Michigan to its east, and off those waters, more bays and tributaries and wetlands, and migratory birds, and minks and martens, and black bears and deer, and approximately forty thousand acres of heavy forest, and nearly twenty thousand acres of farmland, and rolling bales of hay, and fishing ports, and wolves and coyotes and bobcats. The people work the land and waters—fishing and logging, and some work in the village of Garden, while others make long commutes to jobs in construction or manufacturing or various trades. Sprinkled about are summer cottages and camps and communities. There are two townships—Garden and Fairport. Brew lives in Vans Harbor, a fishing community in the township of Garden. Abby once lived there too. Now she visits—holidays mostly, a weekend here or there—until winter turned into spring, and spring turned into June, and now she is here for the summer.

She remembers a day in January, less than five months before. Dull sky through the windows, chicken thighs thawing on the counter, TV playing in the background—sports or news or Sunday afternoon talk hosts, Abby on the sofa, legs tucked underneath her, book on her lap, her father in his recliner, reading the newspaper. The light through the window was changing. The sun was going down. Abby switched on the lamp. She continued reading. The house was drafty. She pulled a blanket over her. Words stared back at her on the page, as if they were looking right at her, as if they could truly see inside her soul—Abby, look, don’t you see? This is what the words said to her, and when they spoke, she felt she understood a little more than she had a moment before, understood a sliver of something. She placed a hand on the page, glanced at her father, his feet in suede slippers, calloused hands holding the newspaper. She looked out the window at the darkening sky.

Because every January was the same—the air felt heavy and she found it harder and harder to breathe. Her chest ached, her legs felt leaden.

Sometimes in the winter when the lakes froze over, there she’d be standing on the shoreline, looking out at the fishing shanties and hearing the revving of snowmobiles racing across the ice. She’d imagine herself out there with the others, the ice breaking and her falling through, her swimming in the dark water, arms growing numb as she tried to get out, as she ran out of breath.

That past Christmas, she and her dad visited Garden. A bonfire was built by the lake. The family was gathered around—snow parkas and hats and gloves and hot beverages. Everyone taking turns on the machines, racing them across the bay in front of Nonna’s house.

Brew pulled up alongside Abby, a warm grin on his face. “Hop on,” he said. And then, “I promise, we’ll stay off the ice.” So she straddled the machine, sitting behind him, and wrapped her arms around his torso.

Always, Abby looked beyond the trappings of her heart and saw beauty out there. She caught images and memorized their details. The wingspan of an osprey floating overhead, the pink shadows in a gray morning cloud, the metallic taste of the cold air on her tongue. And there was Brew—copper eyelashes catching the sun, russet hair in messy waves, that smile of his that broadened as he looked away, taking in a moment that he’d think over, respond to thoughtfully, blue eyes making contact again, plumbing something deep in his friendly way—he had his ways. She’d meditate on this beauty, collect an image in her mind, tuck it into bed with her at night. But still she wondered how to live fully, how to live beyond the pain of a world that could not love her.

I love you, the words would say back to her. I love you, said the sky and wind and osprey.

Then whose love am I looking for?

But she knew. She always had. She was looking for her mother. She was looking for a different past.

She rose from the sofa and moved to the kitchen. She put the chicken thighs in the refrigerator.

“I’m going for a walk,” she told her dad.

He looked up from the paper. “You want me to preheat the oven?”

“No, I won’t be long.”

Abby stepped outside that Sunday afternoon into the dusk, into the cold air—the glow of lights from the smattering of houses, lawns covered in white, a thin layer of crunchy snow over ice on the sidewalk, and then no sidewalk at all, just the hard-packed road, the frozen landscape, the windswept path to the beach, the sky becoming darker still.

She walked the beach, the clack of icy stones underfoot, the subtle sinking of footsteps in the snowy sand, wave song in her ears, evening sky between her gloved fingers and in her long tresses of hair that hung beneath her cap. Darkness spread around her, that strange stillness of the earth, the lake like an ocean, big and vast and mysterious. And this is what she felt—powerless. But the darkness didn’t feel so dark anymore. Somewhere in that darkness was light—an invisible light. She felt the invisible light like gentle snowflakes catching in her hair, on her clothes, melting against her skin.

She was more than the girl whose mom died in a fire, the child who ran through the woods on a cold night in January ten years ago. “An angel was with you,” someone said to her—a nurse, a doctor, a neighbor. And, “Can you tell us what happened?” others wanted to know. But Abby couldn’t tell them anything. The only thing she remembered was the backseat of a car—cold vinyl, the smell of exhaust, heat blowing full-blast, cold fingers, cold toes, a prickly sensation in her fingertips, a matchbook in her left hand.

Or did she remember the matchbook because that is what people told her?

These were the trappings of her heart, and on the other side of those trappings was the invisible light. You are more, Abby. Your life is waiting for you.

She was more than her past. There was more to her life—there was more. That was what she hungered for."