The Girl She Left Behind: 7

The Girl She Left Behind is not funny enough for chick lit, but not depressing enough or with an old enough heroine for women's fiction. The heroine left her musician husband at a gas station and has been traveling for 3 years until she returns to their hometown. She faces problems from the past and how things have and have not changed in her absence. Karen Brichoux really has a way with writing characters and stories that suck you in.

This is a gem of a book about the struggle all women face, no matter what their backgrounds -- learning from past mistakes without being overwhelmed by the pain and guilt thos errors engender. In THE GIRL SHE LEFT BEHIND, Kat's physical journey ends at the novel's start when she lands in her hometown after leaving her husband in the dust. But her emotional journey is just beginning as she encounters the living ghosts of her childhood and has to make peace with each one in her own way. The characters are complex and surprising -- just when you think you have one pegged, Brichoux shows you another dimension to their personalities, making them fully-realized people and not staged caricatures. This is a sweet and poignant coming-of-age story that women of all ages should enjoy.

The Girl She Left Behind by Karen Bichoux is a slightly melancholy treat that deftly tackles issues of place and identity. Montana seems to be all the rage these days but this novel relies more on story and characters than the environs. Silver Creek is the sort of small town that many of us dream about but how would it be, really, to live there?

At a gas pump in Los Angeles, nineteen-year-old Katherine Earle drives off with the U-haul holding all the possessions of her marriage, leaving her husband behind. She doesn't stop moving for three years. This is the second time she's run away. The first time, she left the small town of Silver Creek, Montana, with the boyfriend who later became her husband. Without a word to anyone. Now Kat is back in Silver Creek. She has drifted across the country for three years, running away from her marriage and running away from herself, finally ending up back where she started, like a tumbleweed caught on a fence. She doesn't know why she is here-she just has to be. But even now, she doesn't come into town like the prodigal daughter looking for the fatted calf. She slinks in, getting a job at a motel and a bar on the other side of town from where the woman who raised her, hard-eyed, no-nonsense Great Aunt Eva lives and rules. Kat has no regrets about running away, but guilt seeps in. There's plenty of blame to go around in small towns, and she's not immune. But as Kat is drawn back again into the warp and woof of the town, she begins to see facets of herself she never knew existed. They are revealed to her one by one, like Salome removing her veils. Katherine Earle knows how to close doors, but it will be here that she learns how to open them. Here in the town she left behind, Kat learns the scope and dimensions of her own strength. I've been to Silver Creek, Montana. I know the place in my bones. I was in that drugstore with the creaking floorboards and the lazy ceiling fan moving like boat oars through the air. I know that cottonwood tree where Katherine would go to think. It might not have been in Montana, but I've seen it, sat under it, smelled the grass underneath. The bar. The motel. The people. They are real. Brichoux's prose is straightforward and honest, vivid in its characterization of people and sure in its depiction of place. The ending seems preordained, growing as it did out of the characters and the story. The Girl She Left Behind is a beautifully told tale, heart-warming and unflinchingly honest. A story that stays with you long after you've read the last page.