Book Review: Miller’s Valley

Anna Quindlen is one of my favorite modern authors, and I picked up this book almost as soon as it hit the bookstore shelves.

In 2016.

I’ll let that sink in.

I started the book sometime last year, but lacking the time and mental capacity, I wasn’t really able to engage with it until the end of February. I’m glad I did.

I get that I’m predisposed to like anything Anna Quindlen writes. For some reason, her novels and characters tend to resonate with me. And Miller’s Valley described a small, rural town, and the long slide toward irrelevance. Eventually, the valley is flooded and becomes a recreation area.

These characters somehow seemed like people I know. Recognizable in the familiar faces of my hometown, where family farmers work hard to provide for their families in the way they always have but that our culture is quickly phasing out. Mimi, the driven girl who becomes a doctor and eventually comes back home. Mimi’s brother who goes to Vietnam and comes back different. A family tied to the land that had been in their line for decades. Aunt Ruth who can’t or won’t leave her small house behind Mimi’s and the dark secret she hides.

As an adult, I’ve learned how much my hometown has shaped and formed me. This novel delves into that, the idea of home, the importance of the place and the people who shape the adults we become. It made me cry; it made me laugh; it made me long to visit my hometown and fall into the patterns of the place that built me.

Quindlen’s descriptions are beautiful and poetic at times and none of the characters feel false or undeveloped. Except maybe Eddie, Mimi’s oldest brother, but that gets resolved later in the book.

And maybe that’s also on purpose. The book is told through Mimi’s eyes, starting when she is a child and ending when she is a mother and grandmother herself. So often as kids, we see the adults in our lives as one dimensional and only as we grow older do we begin to discover the nuances of them, the struggles, hardships, desires, hopes and dreams that have fueled and shaped them. And they become three dimensional, flesh-and-blood characters fighting their own battles each and every day that we were blind to for so long.

I think every Anna Quindlen book is worth the read, but this one touched me in a way maybe the others haven’t. Maybe it’s because I read it at a time when I’m undeniably a little homesick—not for my hometown exactly, but for the idea and ideal of it.