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Home Place: A Novel
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Home Place: A Novel
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Home Place: A Novel
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Home Place: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this ebook

Carrie La Seur makes her remarkable debut with The Home Place, a mesmerizing, emotionally evocative, and atmospheric literary novel in the vein of The House Girl and A Land More Kind Than Home, in which a successful lawyer is pulled back into her troubled family’s life in rural Montana in the wake of her sister’s death.

The only Terrebonne who made it out, Alma thought she was done with Montana, with its bleak winters and stifling ways. But an unexpected call from the local police takes the successful lawyer back to her provincial hometown and pulls her into the family trouble she thought she’d left far behind: Her lying, party-loving sister, Vicky, is dead. Alma is told that a very drunk Vicky had wandered away from a party and died of exposure after a night in the brutal cold. But when Alma returns home to bury Vicky and see to her orphaned niece, she discovers that the death may not have been an accident.

The Home Place is a story of secrets that will not lie still, human bonds that will not break, and crippling memories that will not be silenced. It is a story of rural towns and runaways, of tensions corporate and racial, of childhood trauma and adolescent betrayal, and of the guilt that even forgiveness cannot ease. Most of all, this is a story of the place we carry in us always: home.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateJul 29, 2014
ISBN9780062323460
Author

Carrie La Seur

Carrie practices energy and environmental law on behalf of farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans, and does a little writing, from an office in Billings, Montana. Her ancestors homesteaded in Montana in 1864 and survived every sort of calamity and absurdity, so the publishing industry seems pretty tame to her by comparison. Carrie’s improbable but apparently nonfiction résumé includes a degree in English and French from Bryn Mawr College, a Rhodes Scholarship, a doctorate in modern languages from Oxford University, and a Yale law degree. She has always been a writer. “The writing comes easily,” she says. “It’s what I’m always doing in the background, whatever else is going on. It’s like my resting pulse rate to be scribbling what’s happening in my head. If I didn’t, I’d be wandering the streets talking to myself. Sometimes I do that anyway.” In 2006, Carrie founded the legal nonprofit Plains Justice, which provides public interest energy and environmental legal services in the northern plains states. Carrie and Plains Justice have played a key role in halting several new coal plants, enacting clean energy reforms, and launching the Keystone XL pipeline campaign. “I’m still involved in Plains Justice, but I went back to private practice in 2012. Running a nonprofit takes a unique blend of selflessness and enough raging narcissism to think you really can change the world. The burnout rate is similar to that of telemarketers.” A licensed private pilot and committed introvert, Carrie hikes, skis, and fishes the Montana wilderness with her family in her spare time. Her work has appeared in such diverse media as Grist, Harvard Law and Policy Review, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and Salon.

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Reviews for Home Place

Rating: 4.045454545454546 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Author Carrie La Seur's debut work, "The Home Place", is an atmospheric, involving tale of a woman's involuntary return to her past. Attorney Alma Terrebonne has created a tightly-scheduled, neatly-ordered life for herself with a successful career in Seattle. With everything in its proper place, she can immerse herself in her work, pushing herself hard enough to keep haunting memories of her Montana youth at bay. A phone call changes all that when she is informed that her troubled younger sister, Vicky, has been found dead from exposure after a fall and a serious head wound. Flooded by regrets and guilt over her broken relationship with her sister, Alma heads back home to bring order to the chaos Vicky has left behind, and that includes finding a suitable place for Vicky's daughter, Brittany. As Alma reconnects with family and friends, and the home place itself, she begins to sense that her sister's death may not have been an accident. Caught between two worlds, Alma's heart is further confused by her feelings for Chance Murphy--the first love who never really let go. Drawn by the inescapable lure of the land and the legacy of her family's history, Alma must choose where her future lies. Can she let go of her life in Seattle and make a life in Montana, the very place from which she has run for so many years? Can she embrace her heritage as a Terrebonne and truly find peace at the home place?Book Copy Gratis Amazon Vine
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Loved so much of this book - wanted more! Wanted to know the backstory of Ray, the policeman; wanted to know more about the life of Pete (things that were only hinted at), and also about Chance's life. Carrie - write a pre-quel!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When her younger sister dies back home in Montana a girl leaves Seattle to come back to her home place to find out why. As a successful lawyer she has stayed away from the home place and hasn't visited much in the past years because of all the memories. However, she finds the ties are still there and also the memories.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    THE HOME PLACE, by Carrie La Seur, a riveting, powerful, and emotional debut novel about one family’s heritage of love, loss, and forgiveness.

    Attorney Alma Terrebonne is wound tight, organized, and highly professional with a successful career in Seattle as an attorney. She left her home town of Billings, Montana years ago and never wanted to look back, as it hold too many unpleasant memories.

    When she receives a call about her younger troubled sister, Vicky found dead, she is flooded with guilt over their past relationship. Her sister has cried wolf so many times in the past, with everyone rushing to her defense.

    Alma has to face the truth about her broken family (Pete, Alma, and Vicky). They lost their parents when Vicky was only twelve, Pete was military with a drinking problem, and Alma at age seventeen could not take care of her siblings. The aunt and uncle raised Vicky until she became pregnant as a teen and moved in with her boyfriend with drugs, alcohol, and all sorts of money problems, with a hard life. Alma feels so much guilt and despair; however, she had to escape in order to save herself.

    She rushes back home to the small rural town, to help take care of Vicki’s 11 yr. old daughter, Brittany and begins to look into her sister’s death. Things do not add up and she suspects it may not have been an accident, after all. Alma also has feelings for Chance, her first love and finds herself being drawn back to the place she tried so hard to forget.

    A gripping bittersweet journey of murder, secrets, suspense, romance, home, family and self-discovery. I enjoyed La Seur’s writing style with honesty and compassion; however, I listened to the audiobook and narrator, Andrus Nichols was very bland, which may have adversely affected my overall rating of the book.

    However, highly recommend THE HOME PLACE, and look forward to reading more from this newfound and talented author!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Home Place by Carrie La Seur is her debut novel and I truly wanted to like it more than I did. La Seur’s prose is well done and her book is exceptionally atmospheric, unfortunately for me, I did not relate to the main character. Alma Terrebonne left Montana after the death of her parents and planned to never return, that was until her younger sister passed away and she headed home for the funeral. When Carrie returns to Montana she finds a lot more than she bargained for, beginning with the fact her sister’s death may not have been an accident. I did appreciate the small town descriptions, the buried secrets, and the family tensions, however I just could not like Alma. I suggest looking at other reviews before deciding if The Home Place is the book for you.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Alma Terrebone thinks she's escaped a hardscrabble upbringing in Montana. She's a high-powered corporate lawyer in Seattle, with a live-in French-Canadian boyfriend and an imminent merger deal that should give her the inside track to a partnership in her firm. But when she gets a phone call saying her younger sister Vicky was found dead on the streets of their hometown, she is unwillingly drawn back into the family she tried so hard to leave behind.This is an interesting story that walks the edge of being a mystery, except the characters and their relationships with each other and the land that surrounds them is so much more compelling that I found myself not really caring about the whodunit. La Seur's descriptions of Montana are vivid, but it's Alma's musings on how the "home place" — the ranch where her grandaprents lived during her childhood — seeped almost unnoticed into her soul that really resonated. In the end, she knows she'll have to choose between Seattle and Montana, and she has trouble accepting that Montana and her messy family dynamic have more of a hold on her than she thought.All the stories, all the history, everything she knows about every point on the landscape envelops her, and the only word that can express anything about what this place is to her is texture — like running her hands over a variegated rock face or smooth birch bark, embedding them in dough, palming handfuls of red clay mud, sinking her feet into the pebbles in the creek bed, lifting a slick live trout with both hands, lying on the rocky earth, rubbing her horse's sweaty neck. Her body is part of the texture, made of this land and the good, sweet water, healed by the herbs, raised on the stories, grown on the plants and animals, quickened by the air. Her body knows textures here that her mind can't hold consciously all at once.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The author weaves an exacting and challenging plot, with surprise switchbacks, as the main character tries to solve the increasing mystery of her sister's death and life.The rural Montana she creates is one that Ivan Doig would have appreciated. Most of the characters stay true, but readers may well miss Jean-Marc wit, wish that Chance had found a Second True Love, and maybe that Alma and Officer Ray Curtis had sent up some new sparks.Great suspense!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I won this print in a giveaway hosted by Goodreads and I enjoyed every page as I shred tears and empathized with Alma. How do you return to the place you thought you'd never see again to bury your younger sister and be responsible for her daughter when you knew if you hadn't left town to make a new life for yourself in a new town that was more forgiving than small town Montana where the cold ate at your soul it would have been you instead?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This story takes place in Big Sky Country, the State of Montana. Alma, a lawyer working in Seattle, left her family - and particularly her younger sister Vicky - in Montana many years ago, but is now called back when Vicky is found dead on the street on a freezing, winter morning. Trying to unravel how Vicky died and all of the secrets held by her dysfunctional family, as well as hooking up with the former love of her life, consumes Alma to the point where she ends up making major changes in her own life. I thought the book was beautifully written, encompassing all of the grandeur of the Montana surroundings and the heartbreak and guilt Alma experiences because of her previous actions. I highly recommend this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Home PlaceBy: Carrie La Seur Pages. 304Published By: William Morrow & CompanyCopy Courtesy of TheReadingRoom Advanced Reading CopyReviewed By: doseofbellaVicky’s dead! Alma Terrebonne works in Seattle as an attorney for a prestigious law firm. Leaving Montana behind and all the memories with it, she feels that life is going in the right direction. A career, a great male companion, and all is well…until a phone call from the Montana Police Department telling her that her sister Vicky is dead. I refuse to give away any spoilers, but hold on to your hats, its going to be an amazing ride. The incredible past Alma has refused to let over-shadow her life in Seattle hits her like a freight train. Things she knew, some she surely did not know… suddenly begin to make sense in a dark twisted way. Carrie La Seur is like a breath of fresh air for a lover of mystery/suspense/thriller reader like myself. True a murder plot is nothing new, but where she goes from there is absolutely pure gold. You will have to remember to close your mouth to many times to count, and remind yourself not to make comments out loud when others are around. Take your time and devour every morsel of this book, then do it again. It is additive and food for the soul of a reader.Immerse yourself in a reader’s true pleasure zone. It will leave you wanting more. 5/5
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Highest rating! This novel combines a brutal family saga with the infinite beauty of wide open Montana. The Terrebonnes are a large loving group with one escapee: Alma, who, after her parents were killed in a car crash, got a scholarship and got out. She's in Seattle, a corporate lawyer who's closing on a big deal when she is called home. In Billings are a brother, aunts, uncles, grandmother, a niece, and an ex boyfriend who all need her. And then there's the Home Place, the Terrebonne rural primitive home under aggressive attack by Big Coal. Back in Seattle is her big deal and her elegant boyfriend Jean-Marc.There's family, a murder, suspects, and topping it all off, amazing descriptions of the land and what it takes to stay on it and keep it from predators.Couldn't put it down.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “The cold on a Saturday night in Billings, Montana, is personal and spiritual . . .”I was completely hooked by The Home Place even before I had it in my hands. Just reading the hauntingly beautiful opening pages sampled on Amazon made me almost desperate to go on, and I recommend trying that if you might be interested because the finished book fully met all my hopeful expectations based on that passage--if you enjoy the first section I think you’ll love the book. After the death of her parents, Alma escaped as far away from her Montana home, high school boyfriend, and extended family as she could by leaving for an East Coast college, but it’s not that she hated the place or people. She loved both but, overwhelmed by her loss, she turned herself into another person, a driven and highly successful Seattle lawyer living with her French Canadian lover. When Alma’s troubled younger sister dies in questionable circumstances she comes home to take care of her niece and investigate. The “home place” of the title is the rustic, isolated farm house her family lived in for generations, though it’s deserted now and an aggressive mining company representative is pressuring Alma’s grandmother to sell. When Alma moves back into the home place with her niece to try to sort out what happened to her sister and what’s going on in her family she’s down the road from the ranch of the boyfriend she abandoned years ago and so necessarily but uneasily back in his life. As a literary psychological thriller very grounded in its location,The Home Place reminds me of novels by Tana French and Julia Heaberlin, though the austere beauty of its Big Sky Midwestern setting is far from French’s Dublin. Full of tension and suspense and without an ounce of saccharin this is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    There is a certain beauty in the descriptions La Seur evokes in The Home Place and the coming home story is always one that can deliver competing emotions in a reader. The trouble is La Seur both overreaches and overwrites this story. Overreaches because she loads up every stereotypical family malady she can come up with and douses the Terrebonne family with every single one of them - to the point where you just don't care about any of them. The story is so focused on everyone's foibles, that we never develop any feelings to hold on to. In addition, all of her characters sound like the same person and fail to show very much emotional depth.Overwrites because La Seur simply can't go even three lines into a conversation without diverging into a multi-page flashback that invariably has little to do with what her character is currently experiencing. The use of flashbacks to fill back-story is so hackneyed that I had difficulty continuing past the first 100 pages. When I did, I was very disappointed that the fertile ground of the life of a gay man in such a conservative place and the serious impact of mining on rural America are both introduced and then glossed over in favor of the cliche-riddled mystery that truly misses the mark as well. Unfortunately, there is little about The Home Place that I can recommend.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Billings, Montana author debut novel. Many references to real places in the area where I live makes this novel interesting, but the story itself is compelling.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A bold well-written novel featuring the trendy theme of successful family member who has left the hometown and is pulled back into a family disaster/drama she thought she was well out of. In this case, the setting is a bleak, rundown rural town in Montana. With the exception of the main character Alma Terrebone, the family is underemployed, under-educated, dysfunctional, and struggling to recover from a series of poor choices, bad luck, and outside villains. The publisher tells us:The only Terrebonne who made it out, Alma thought she was done with Montana, with its bleak winters and stifling ways. But an unexpected call from the local police takes the successful lawyer back to her provincial hometown and pulls her into the family trouble she thought she’d left far behind: Her lying, party-loving sister, Vicky, is dead. Alma is told that a very drunk Vicky had wandered away from a party and died of exposure after a night in the brutal cold. But when Alma returns home to bury Vicky and see to her orphaned niece, she discovers that the death may not have been an accident. The story is deeply emotional, offering insights into the basic human need for forgiveness, for family, and for a place that holds the roots of our grounded-ness. There were a few sections where I almost lost interest, but on the whole, readers will find this an excellent debut novel with a story worth reading. I look forward to more from this author.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I really liked this book but only gave it 3 stars because there were things that just didn't fit in a sentence every now and then, maybe an editing issue?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When Alma Terrebonne receives word of her sister Vicky’s death, she immediately heads home to Montana where [predictably] she is pulled back into the issues of her troubled family. Was her sister’s death an accident or was it actually something more sinister? Who should raise Vicky’s daughter? What about the mining company seeking access to the family homestead? These are essential questions, but the core of this story is the understanding of home and of the things that truly define each of us.Although Alma is the central character, she is not particularly sympathetic [or easy to like] and the other folks seem stereotypical, making it difficult for the reader to identify with this family’s narrative. The fairly predictable plot, in which too many elements remain unresolved, brings nothing new to the family saga milieu.But the book’s true treasure lies in its lyrical depiction of the setting. Eloquent descriptions reveal the charm of the surroundings as they entrench the reader in the place of the story. It is for the richness and beauty of this landscape that the reader will keep turning the pages.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A nicely done debut mystery involving the death/murder of a woman with a young daughter living in Billings, Montana. Her sister, who is a lawyer on the west coast, must leave her job for a time to help put family affairs in order while doing a little snooping into her sister.s death. Two things become readily apparent. First, there is more than meets the eye with her sister's demise and second, "the home place" has some attractions and pull upon her that she never realized. There are three main twists in the plot and I only figured out one of them in advance - so that is a good thing. The book was well worth reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was drawn to this book due to its location obviously. I love my new home state and I've found myself reading more books that take place in it - modern and historical. This book opens in winter with a description of the cold of Montana and after last winter I felt one with that cold.This is the story of a family with deep roots in Montana but a family that holds its secrets close. Alma was able to escape her small town and lives a very successful life in Seattle where she is a busy lawyer living with wealthy man who cares for her very much. One day she gets a phone call that will shock her established life to its core - her sister is dead and it might not be a natural death.Alma goes home to her family, to the home place and to the memories both good and bad. She stays with her grandmother, fights with her uncle and reunites with her brother. She works with the police to find out what happened to her sister and she learns that all is not well with anyone. The home place is threatened and her niece is not talking.I was pulled into this story from the first sentence and it stole a Saturday from me as I got so involved in the story I didn't stop reading until I finished the book. I was a little annoyed because I had things to get done but I could not stop reading. The writing is beautiful, it is ugly, it is full of lies and it tells the truth. It is small town life - the kind of life that if you grew up in a small town you know you never escape no matter how successful you become. You family always defines you. It supports you and it is what can hurt you the most.I have kept this book to read again because I know I will find more on a second reading and I will look forward to more from Ms. La Seur.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Unless you have been out west (Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, etc) it's impossible to describe the sheer beauty and enormous space there is there. I spent a few years living in Wyoming, in Laramie where I went to school at the Univ. of Wyoming, and as much as I hated the brutal winters that would rip my face open it felt like with the wind and the snow and the ice, I also admired on a near-daily basis the beauty of the mountains and the majesty of the land surrounding me. In THE HOME PLACE by Carrie La Seur, some of that is captured and I was impressed in the reverence with which La Seur approached her subject.Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on August 14, 2014.