Evergreen

May 5, 2014
Evergreen is a small pocket of habitable forestland in rural Minnesota, where, in 1938, giddy newlyweds Eveline and Emil start a life together. Their riverside cabin is stubbornly removed from the nearest town of Yellow Falls, with its electricity and grocery stores. Soon a baby is on the way, and their marriage unfolds, almost too sweetly. But Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters) has a knack for destabilizing her characters as soon as she’s got them settled. Emil heads home to his native Germany, and his father’s deathbed, with World War II on the horizon. Eveline, nursing an infant, refuses to stay with her parents but, instead, emulates Lulu, her neighbor across the river, who hunts, curses, and stomps around in a dusty coat of animal pelts. Eveline learns empowering survival skills, but they do little to protect her from a stranger who appears one night and rapes her, leaving her pregnant. Mothers, daughters, and granddaughters struggle with abandonment, physical violation, and illness in this story. Rasmussen does not shy away from evil characters—rapists, child abusers—but her most unnerving character is Eveline’s son, Hux. Without an ill-intentioned bone in his body, he makes the women look comparatively unhinged and, at times, selfish. Evergreen is serene, but not safe. If Rasmussen’s characters contained such subtleties and contradictions, the novel would be more realistic. And yet, Rasumssen makes her point about the indelibility of trauma and the impossibility of avoiding heartbreak.

July 1, 2014
A malign stranger's visit to a remote Minnesota log cabin in the 1930s will cast long shadows over a family in a fatalistic second novel.After her quirky debut, Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters, 2011) returns to the subject of siblings, this time via a fairy tale-flavored three-generation family portrait set in a forest wilderness. Evergreen is the tiny riverside community to which Eveline LeMay travels in 1938 to join her new husband, German immigrant and taxidermist Emil. Arriving dreamily in a rudderless boat, Eveline disembarks into a life of rural simplicity and hard labor, wrapped in the sweetness of a loving marriage. Soon after a son, Hux, is born, however, Emil is called back to Germany, to his father's deathbed. The year being 1939, his return to Eveline will not be problem-free. Opting to stay on the land instead of returning to her own parents during Emil's absence, Eveline discovers strength and local friendship but also suffers a traumatic rape which leads to the birth of a daughter, Naamah, whom Eveline reluctantly decides to abandon at the door of Hopewell, a Catholic orphanage. Naamah's cruel treatment at the hands of Sister Cordelia, the crazed nun in charge at Hopewell, leaves ineradicable scars on the child's psyche; although she escapes at age 14, her behavior-even after Hux finds and rescues her, years later-is proof of deep-rooted damage. Rasmussen's devoted storytelling lends grace to the proceedings, but there's a sense of sketchiness, both in the story and the cast of one-note characters whose problems are largely wiped away in an overwhelmingly sweet conclusion.The delicate inventiveness that marked this author's first novel is less apparent in her sentimental second.

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February 1, 2014

In her sophomore novel, Rasmussen (The Bird Sisters) writes of characters secluded from society, primarily by choice. Spanning roughly 35 years, the story begins with pregnant Evaline arriving at the northern Minnesota cabin of her new husband, Emil. The couple and their only neighbors, Lulu and Reddy, subsist primarily by hunting, trapping, and fishing. A tragic series of events leads Evaline to leave her second child at an orphanage run by a sadistic nun. Namaah is never able to overcome fully the damage done to her there, though the narrative holds out some hope of her eventually healing. VERDICT With its gloomy orphanage containing horrors out of Dickens and characters with a nearly mythical connection to the natural world, this novel has a touch of the gothic. Though most of her characters are deeply wounded in some way, Rasmussen shows great compassion for them all, even the almost irredeemable Sister Cordelia. Throughout is a theme of a need for human connection and interdependence, even among people who choose to live apart.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2014
Rasmussen has been steadily crafting a unique brand of midwestern literature that combines offbeat characters and timeless rhythms reminiscent of folk tales with touching story lines about the pain and hard-won joys of real life. As with her debut, The Bird Sisters (2011), in her new book, she shows her strong affection for the picturesque rural settings of yesteryear. In 1938, Eveline Sturm joins her German-born husband, Emil, in the northern Minnesota backwoods. Their isolated cabin is beyond rustic, and her only reading material is Emil's taxidermy manuals, yet she decides to remain alone with their baby son, Hux, when Emil returns to Germany to care for his father. Years later, Eveline's daughter, Naamah, the product of a traumatic rape, grows up amid cruelty in a Catholic orphanage. After reuniting with his half sister as an adult, Hux tries to help the beautiful, damaged Naamah recapture her lost childhood. In this character-driven saga of friendship and the thorny bonds of family, Rasmussen writes with wisdom and compassion about the people and places that shape us, for better and worse.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)