The Winter in Anna

October 10, 2016
Karaim’s (If Men Were Angels) haunting second novel opens with Anna’s suicide, an event Eric Valery finds himself returning to as an older man and a new father. He recounts dropping out of college at the age of 20 and moving to Shannon, N.Dak., to work at the Shannon Sentinel, where he meets Anna. The two of them, both editors, spend time alone laying out the newspaper in the pre-Internet days, and Anna begins to share with Eric fragments of her dark past: growing up without money in the badlands, her young marriage going sour,
the mysterious scars on her wrists. Readers follow the pair on their small-town reporting adventures—to the dikes during bad floods, to the high school’s graduation ceremony, to a sailboat race
on the lake—through Eric’s yearlong stint in Shannon, watching their friendship deepen and grow stronger, when suddenly, with winter, something changes
in Anna. Though the prose occasionally falters, Anna’s story and the mystery of her death are captivating, and Eric’s
meditations on the grieving process are wonderfully crafted. Eric’s journalistic attempt to piece together Anna’s story make this a beautiful, touching novel.

November 1, 2016
A longtime journalist looks back solemnly at his first job and one cryptic woman's influence on him.Ricky, the narrator of Karaim's second novel (If Men Were Angels, 1999), opens this story grimly: he's learned that Anna, a former co-worker, has killed herself by drinking bleach in a motel room. Flash back to young Ricky, fresh out of college and quickly elevated to editor-in-chief of a small-town weekly newspaper in central North Dakota. The job itself isn't especially demanding--he and his small staff cover fires, floods, and festivals, with the occasional dash of mild civic scandal. Anna is the real focus of his investigative skills, a puzzle he can't solve but keeps coming back to: a single mother of two, she delivers the occasional tart line to blunt the young man's arrogance while keeping her past carefully concealed. (Why did she leave her husband? What's with the scars on her wrists?) The two engage in something of a flirtation, but Karaim is careful not to frame this as a love story or even a woman-who-got-away story. Anna is a study in depression and grief, and as the story moves along, the reasons for those dark emotions become starker and deeper. Anna's storm clouds, combined with Karaim's elegant depictions of the wide, empty landscapes on the edge of the Badlands ("the spot in our national geography where the Midwest becomes the West" ), give the novel an overall bittersweet feel--he's elegiac about youth and simpler times for newspapers. But the novel's structure is overly manicured in ways that make its emotional effects seem forced, from the carefully timed reveals of Anna's past to the dry subplots about locals and friends' relationships. Anna's sadness is sympathetically but repetitively handled, leading to a fate whose end we already learned on Page 1. A melancholy, earnest study of friendship.

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Starred review from November 15, 2016

In this quietly powerful novel, Eric Valery, a young college dropout, finds a job as a newspaper editor in a small South Dakota town. He soon meets the newspaper's photographer, Anna, a reserved woman a few years older than he. His year in Shannon, SD, revolves around the reporting of everyday events (and some extraordinary events, including a major flood) and his gradual discovery of Anna's deeply painful secrets, including a youthful marriage gone bad and the loss of a child. Through it all, Eric's affection for the sad yet fiercely determined young woman grows. The story is told by an older, married Eric years later after Anna's suicide. "Haunting" is the word that perhaps best describes this emotionally generous tale. From Anna's memories of loss to Eric's regret over what might have been--and been different for Anna--this wise, bittersweet novel of roads taken and not taken and the consequences of our choices, plays out against the backdrop of the almost existential emptiness of the Dakota prairies--a land as beautiful and unforgiving as life itself. VERDICT This latest from Karaim (If Men Were Angels) will linger long in readers' minds.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2016
Although the main character of Karaim's second novel is a journalist, as in his first novel (If Men Were Angels, 1999), the author takes a departure here from insider politics to character study in small-town North Dakota. Eric has dropped out of college and finds work at the Shannon Sentinel covering local (read: high school) sports teams. There he meets the beautiful, older Anna, who will become his work partner and closest friend. Anna has left a secretive past and an abusive husband behind, things Eric yearns to know about but struggles to understand. He tells the story of their relationship through the eyes of his middle-aged self, after he has learned tragic news that makes him question his actions during the time he knew Anna. The well-drawn secondary characters and the details of working for a newspaper in the halcyon days prior to the Internet round out the novel. Pair this with Shelter in Place by Alexander Maksik, another new novel about a young man detailing an early relationship and its long-lasting effects.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)