Stone Sister
Published on 15. September 2021
Book
Hardback
454 pages
978-1-62557-146-5 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the 2020 Big Moose Prize
Spanning the mid to late 20th century and set in the Elkhorn Valley of southwestern Montana, The Stone Sister is told from three points of view - a father's, a nurse's, and a sister's. Together they tell the unforgettable story of a child's birth, disappearance, and finally discovery in a home for "backward children." Robert Carter, a newly married man just back from World War II, struggles with his and his wife's decision to entrust the care of their disabled child to an institution and "move on" with family life. Louise Gustafson, a Midwestern nurse who starts over with a new life in the West, finds herself caring for a child everyone else has abandoned. And Elizabeth Carter, a young journalist, uncovers the family secret of her lost sister as she struggles with starting a family of her own.
The Stone Sister explores the power of family secrets and society's evolving definitions of "normal"-as it pertains to family, medicine, and social structure. The novel sheds light on the beginnings of the disability justice movement as it follows one family's journey to reckon with a painful past. Incredibly, the novel is based on Caroline Patterson's personal story. As an adult, she discovered she had an older sister with Down syndrome who had been written out of her family history. In fact, that sister's name was also Caroline Patterson.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
767 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62557-146-5 (9781625571465)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Caroline Patterson is the author of Ballet at the Moose Lodge and two children's books on the natural world. She edited the literary anthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart. Her short fiction and essays have been published in journals including Epoch, Outside, Southwest Review, and Seventeen, and have been included in anthologies including A Million Acres, Montana Noir, Bright Bones, and The New Montana Story. A graduate of the University of Montana creative writing program in fiction, she was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University, the Joseph Henry Jackson Prize from the San Francisco Foundation, a Vogelstein Foundation Award, and the Montana Arts Council Fellowship. She's received residencies at Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Ragdale. She is currently the executive director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative, which places writers to teach creative writing in more than 34 elementary schools in rural, urban, and reservation schools across western Montana.She lives with her husband, writer Fred Haefele, in the Missoula home her great-grandfather built in 1906, which he built on the banks of the Clark Fork River where, he told his five-year-old son back in Chicago, they could throw stones in the water and the family could come and "cut out all worrying." Her two grown children visit on Sundays for dinner and laundry.