THE BASKET MAKER
by
Kate Niles
GreyCore Press
Hardcover, 224 pages, $22.95
ISBN 0-9742074-0-3
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
In The Basket Maker, Kate Niles explores parallel traumas suffered by a young girl, a mother, and an older woman, none of whom are related, but all of whom struggle with their own pain. Sarah, a plucky little girl, is abused by her father and ignored by her mother. Barbara, the mother of a boy who is severely burned after falling into hot water at the bottom of a manhole, cannot overcome her grief from her son s injuries. Maddy, much older than the other two, lives with the nightmare that her husband hung himself, and she was the one who found him dead. A finalist for the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Award, The Basket Maker is a sensitive work of fiction that weaves different and disparate voices through multiple first-person points of view, and shows that where family fails, redemption may be found through community.
The author herself is an incest survivor. She demonstrates that even in the tangle of abuse, there is the constant attempt by the child to connect with the abuser, and the constant frustration of rarely being able to do so. Consider this short scene involving Sarah and her father:
The sandstone cliff has
crisscross lines in it. Cross-bedding,
Dad says. These cliffs used to be
gigantic sand dunes and it always amazes me that things can change so much like
that. While Beowulf sniffs around I look
for heart-shaped rocks. I found one once
like that in Canyonlands and tried to give it to Dad because I knew it was his
heart. Canyonlands is where he
especially likes to go with his students.
But he just left my rock on a picnic table even though I told him it was
his. I had to go back for it.
Then this scene with the older woman Maddie, holding a worry stone, wondering why there s a light on in the basement of Sarah s house so late at night, and wanting to protect Sarah:
I worry it and
worry it. The smoothness of the stone is
soothing; it feels safe and dangerous all at once, which it is, I suppose, how
all weapons must feel. I think about
giving it to Sarah, because the light in the basement makes me think she needs
something like that.
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