Falling into Place

"It's not easy," Catherine Reid writes, "to love a person and a place in equal measure." Love she does, however, as described in these intimate, lyric essays about the land and people around her. With the inside perspective of a native daughter combined with her outsider status as a lesbian, Reid explores such paradoxes as those that arise from harnessing wild rivers or legalizing same-sex marriage. Her fascination with natural phenomena-whether bird hibernation, the arrival of...
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"It's not easy," Catherine Reid writes, "to love a person and a place in equal measure." Love she does, however, as described in these intimate, lyric essays about the land and people around her. With the inside perspective of a native daughter combined with her outsider status as a lesbian, Reid explores such paradoxes as those that arise from harnessing wild rivers or legalizing same-sex marriage. Her fascination with natural phenomena-whether bird hibernation, the arrival of fishers in suburbia, or the explosion of amphibious life in the wet weeks of spring-is captured in writing that pays as much attention to the sounds of a sentence as to the rhythms of the landscapes she wanders. Ultimately, however, Reid finds herself having to choose between her lover and her home place.