This is the story of the Spoon family, and the protagonist is shy, honorable Mackie, the first child of a strange marriage whose beginnings are kept secret from her although they become known to her younger, fiery sister, Etta. It is a complicated tale of sibling love and rivalry, of parental guilt, and of emotions that become as shattered as the very landscape against which they are revealed. After the arrival of a half-Indian hired boy, Audie Kipp, and their mother's accidental and somewhat mysterious death, the fantasies haunting these two lonely girls become realities. The narrative -- that Mackie loves Audie who loves Etta who loves the no-good Becker Birdsall and that Etta becomes pregnant by Becker and marries Audie and Mackie finally runs away only to be betrayed by another man after he impregnates her -- is as old as time.
But there are moments in this book when Peery's language lifts the story into a more universal realm. Here is Mackie describing her feelings when she and Call make love for the first time in the barn: "We lay down in all of it, in a way that felt like all the world was gathered into one sweet skin, and though you knew it was wrong, down deep, in bone and blood and muscle, you desired the one forbidden thing your head told you you weren't supposed to want, and in that wanting, in that knowing it was wrong, there was a stillness at the center, calm and full and sly, that came from knowing you would do it anyway, and you could tell your head to cease its thinking, to let the bone and blood and muscle have their way, glad, for what you were doing seemed the holiest of human acts and in that time when everything was fighting in you you were as whole as you would ever be."
