For Review: Fremont ~ Elizabeth Reeder

Hal Fremont and Rachel Roanoke meet in a diner. For their first date, they get married. Their love, and their lust, is fast, hard, and intense. Their marriage is perfect, and they both dream of fixing up the Fremont family home and filling it with their children. But Hal wants sons, and their first child is a girl, Florida. Each of the thirteen children Rachel has are named after American States, a contrast to the small minded small town in which they live. The second of the brood is their only son, the lone star Texas. After him come eleven more girls, each growing into a unique individual. Fremont follows the lives of the family, and explores how familial relationships make or break the people we are, and the people we can potentially become.

By page 40 (out of 350), I was heart broken. To the point that it was hard to read, but in that lovely way that happens when reading a properly good book. Throughout the novel, my heart was broken probably a thousand times. What each character goes through, what the family goes through, and how one affects the other, made for some tough love reading. In particular, though, I loved the relationship between Texas and Florida - they each want what they other has, and the turmoil this puts them through can be terrible in places. Florida, the eldest Fremont child, just wants her freedom. She wants to leave her home, and study, and do what she wants to do, not tied down to playing nanny to her younger siblings. She sees Texas as having that freedom, that ability to do what he wants. But Texas struggles with the masculine ideals his father forces upon him, and he wants Florida's ability to be who she is, an individual, and even envys her femininity, because it's allowed. Neither of them consider, at least very rarely, that the other might be tormented, that they might not love the hand that has been given to them.

Given that there is a husband, a wife, and thirteen children, there are many complicated relationships in this novel. But, where Hal might struggle to remember the names and differences between his girls, each one shone through in her own particular way, and lended something important to the telling of the story. It's a story that I almost don't want to delve too far into here, for fear of unearthing things that are better left discovered. Suffice to say that there was little room left for romantic ideals (love, motherhood, family, place), and plenty space for nostalgia and longing (love, motherhood, family, place).

And it's some telling too. Reeder's prose is stunning. She lays down the land in front of the reader, makes them feel safe, then snatches it all away in cruel twists of reality. No matter what Reeder is describing, it is coloured with lyrical attention. Fremont is such a bittersweet book in this way - the story might hurt in places, but the reading is soothed by the beauty of the language. Reeder has really shown the literary world what she is made of this year.

Kohl Publishing; October 2012
350 pages