I realized then that not only did dad need us to believe his stories, we needed to believe them as well. To believe in unripe stars and eagles able to do extraordinary things. What it boiled down to was a frenzied hope that there was more to life than the reality around us. Only then could we claim a destiny we did not feel cursed to.
Betty is born in 1954 to a Cherokee father and a white mother. she is born sixth in the line up of eight brothers and sisters and the only of her siblings who inherited her father's looks. Betty grows up living with a mentally-ill mother, and a father who teaches hope and beauty through his fantastical stories. Their life is one of poverty and brutal hardship. The family is living in the shadow of past traumas and unprocessed familial grief.
Do you know that feeling you get when you have cried very hard for a sustained amount of time and you sit in the aftermath of all the tears. sticky-faced, blurry-eyed, gulping breaths like you're starving for air? That is how I felt reading this book. Like a good cry, I felt both better and resigned to everything I had witnessed through the brutal telling of this story.
This is one of those books that I am deeply grateful I pushed through and finished because the writing was incredible...but... It was deeply difficult to finish. I had to set it down for a couple weeks and read something else for awhile. When I returned to the read I had hoped I had gotten through the most brutal parts... I had not even scratched the surface. This book pulls no punches and the redemptions of its characters comes at the curtain call of the story; too little too late to do much more than mop up a drop of blood on the outskirts of a massacre.
This novel was a wasteland of hopelessness. The fragile hope of this story came solely from the stories Betty's dad told his children. Stories of Eagles that carry your sorrows to the heavens so you don't have to hold on to them. Stories of magical books with stories written in flames. beautiful stories, unrelenting in their deeply hopeful messages and rich with faith for a better world. I clung to the the stories Betty's father told as a refuge from the full on emotional assault of this novel in the same way that I imagine his children found pockets of respite from their life long storm of grief and hardship. The magic of this story is this father's love. The undoing of the reader is that his love is not enough of a protection against the beating fists of destruction.
I don't think I will ever forget this story and the longer I sit in the finale of it, the more spectacular it seems.
Content warning: Incest, rape, racism, homophobia, infant loss, death of a child, suicide, attempted suicide, miscarriage, animal abuse, assault, drug abuse, mental illness.
Thank You to Knopf publishers for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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