Love and Country
By Christina Adam

     The soundtrack to this novel might include "Looking For a Soft Place To Fall" from "The Horse Whisperer" would go perfectly, that old Hank Williams Sr. standby, "There's A Tear In My Beer," or "In The Living Years" by Mike + the Mechanics. An old joke says that if you rewind a country song, you get the truck, the dog and the woman back.

     For Kenny Swanson, his on-her-own lovelorn mother Lenna, restless gifted spirit Cynthia Dustin, and Roddy Moyers, rewinding this book would erase the painful death of Kenny's absent, careless pilot and hunter father Kenneth, but also would reverse the growth these lost souls experience. To run the song of love and country would be to erase the beautiful, poignant way Christina Adam describes the landscape (the snow makes "a shifting, ticking sound") as large as the dreams of the broncos Roddy rides and Kenny dreams of riding. The landscape includes Lenna's conflicts between being a good mother and knowing the love of a man, Kenny's rodeo yearnings and divided parental loyalties, Roddy's bad-boy restlessness, and musical, gifted Cynthia Dustin's struggle against her abusive father, reminiscent of the heroine's grandfather in "Whale Rider."

      This is not an "adults-bad kids-good" tale. Adults such as Lenna, Roddy and Cynthia's father make all too real errors that remind us of ourselves. They dance drunkenly through their choices as Lenna and Roddy do during a Christmas Eve dinner, and pause, frozen like Lenna when she catches Roddy kissing Cynthia on the same Christmas Eve.

       In her idiosyncratic, unique style, Adam bounces from choice to choice in her characters' lives, often interrupting a crisis point or epiphany in Lenna's life to focus on Cynthia, then coming back to Kenny. This style may not suit some readers. However, Adam does not deal in quick, easy wrap-ups. Her characters matter, and she wants us to pay attention to their ordinary yet extraordinary paths, hoping for Lenna and Kenny, whose bond is subtly, touchingly portrayed, to become whole, and for the song of LOVE AND COUNTRY, played by Cynthia, to be one of joy and forgiveness.