Review: The Home Place by Carrie La Seur

The Home Place

by Carrie La Seur

Publisher: William Morrow

Pages: 304

Format: ARC

Buy the Book: Amazon

Goodreads:  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.


Kritters Thoughts:  Alma is a middle sister in a family that has definitely had quite a few tragedies to overcome and I am not sure they are completely through them at all.  Alma is called home because her little sister Vicky is found dead on the side of the road on a bitterly cold evening in Montana.  She must come home and bury her sister, confront some things from her past and figure out what really happened the night her sister died.  

A family drama with a lot of drama.  A set of three siblings who lost their parents at young ages and had to depend on extended family to provide their basics and Alma was able to escape to college, where Vicky and Pete didn't take the easy road.  I loved all of the parts of the family and their different pieces to the puzzle with these siblings.  

The concept of home was huge in this book and I appreciated the author's emphasis on going home and all the things that can happen when you are gone and return to the place you grew up - both good and bad.  Everything is similar and everything is different at the same moment and Alma has to decide how she will come out of the situation and what her path will look like without her sister in it.  

This book wasn't too far out of my usual genre, but felt different than the normal family drama and I am not sure if it was just because the setting was just so different for me.  I rarely read about a book set in the midwest and have never lived there myself, so I absolutely adored the time that the author put into making this book feel authentically Montana.  


Rating: definitely a good read, but can't read two in a row

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I received one copy of this book free of charge from TLC Book Tours.  I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own.