The Home Place: A Novel

Alma Terrebone thinks she's escaped a hardscrabble upbringing in Montana. She's a high-powered corporate lawyer in Seattle, with a live-in French-Canadian boyfriend and an imminent merger deal that should give her the inside track to a partnership in her firm. But when she gets a phone call saying her younger sister Vicky was found dead on the streets of their hometown, she is unwillingly drawn back into the family she tried so hard to leave behind.

This is an interesting story that walks the edge of being a mystery, except the characters and their relationships with each other and the land that surrounds them is so much more compelling that I found myself not really caring about the whodunit. La Seur's descriptions of Montana are vivid, show more but it's Alma's musings on how the "home place" — the ranch where her grandaprents lived during her childhood — seeped almost unnoticed into her soul that really resonated. In the end, she knows she'll have to choose between Seattle and Montana, and she has trouble accepting that Montana and her messy family dynamic have more of a hold on her than she thought.

All the stories, all the history, everything she knows about every point on the landscape envelops her, and the only word that can express anything about what this place is to her is texture — like running her hands over a variegated rock face or smooth birch bark, embedding them in dough, palming handfuls of red clay mud, sinking her feet into the pebbles in the creek bed, lifting a slick live trout with both hands, lying on the rocky earth, rubbing her horse's sweaty neck. Her body is part of the texture, made of this land and the good, sweet water, healed by the herbs, raised on the stories, grown on the plants and animals, quickened by the air. Her body knows textures here that her mind can't hold consciously all at once. show less

Author Carrie La Seur's debut work, "The Home Place", is an atmospheric, involving tale of a woman's involuntary return to her past. Attorney Alma Terrebonne has created a tightly-scheduled, neatly-ordered life for herself with a successful career in Seattle. With everything in its proper place, she can immerse herself in her work, pushing herself hard enough to keep haunting memories of her Montana youth at bay. A phone call changes all that when she is informed that her troubled younger sister, Vicky, has been found dead from exposure after a fall and a serious head wound. Flooded by regrets and guilt over her broken relationship with her sister, Alma heads back home to bring order to the chaos Vicky has left behind, and that includes show more finding a suitable place for Vicky's daughter, Brittany. As Alma reconnects with family and friends, and the home place itself, she begins to sense that her sister's death may not have been an accident. Caught between two worlds, Alma's heart is further confused by her feelings for Chance Murphy--the first love who never really let go. Drawn by the inescapable lure of the land and the legacy of her family's history, Alma must choose where her future lies. Can she let go of her life in Seattle and make a life in Montana, the very place from which she has run for so many years? Can she embrace her heritage as a Terrebonne and truly find peace at the home place?

Book Copy Gratis Amazon Vine show less

I was drawn to this book due to its location obviously. I love my new home state and I've found myself reading more books that take place in it - modern and historical. This book opens in winter with a description of the cold of Montana and after last winter I felt one with that cold.

This is the story of a family with deep roots in Montana but a family that holds its secrets close. Alma was able to escape her small town and lives a very successful life in Seattle where she is a busy lawyer living with wealthy man who cares for her very much. One day she gets a phone call that will shock her established life to its core - her sister is dead and it might not be a natural death.

Alma goes home to her family, to the home place and to the show more memories both good and bad. She stays with her grandmother, fights with her uncle and reunites with her brother. She works with the police to find out what happened to her sister and she learns that all is not well with anyone. The home place is threatened and her niece is not talking.

I was pulled into this story from the first sentence and it stole a Saturday from me as I got so involved in the story I didn't stop reading until I finished the book. I was a little annoyed because I had things to get done but I could not stop reading. The writing is beautiful, it is ugly, it is full of lies and it tells the truth. It is small town life - the kind of life that if you grew up in a small town you know you never escape no matter how successful you become. You family always defines you. It supports you and it is what can hurt you the most.

I have kept this book to read again because I know I will find more on a second reading and I will look forward to more from Ms. La Seur. show less

“The cold on a Saturday night in Billings, Montana, is personal and spiritual . . .”

I was completely hooked by The Home Place even before I had it in my hands. Just reading the hauntingly beautiful opening pages sampled on Amazon made me almost desperate to go on, and I recommend trying that if you might be interested because the finished book fully met all my hopeful expectations based on that passage--if you enjoy the first section I think you’ll love the book.

After the death of her parents, Alma escaped as far away from her Montana home, high school boyfriend, and extended family as she could by leaving for an East Coast college, but it’s not that she hated the place or people. She loved both but, overwhelmed by her loss, show more she turned herself into another person, a driven and highly successful Seattle lawyer living with her French Canadian lover. When Alma’s troubled younger sister dies in questionable circumstances she comes home to take care of her niece and investigate.

The “home place” of the title is the rustic, isolated farm house her family lived in for generations, though it’s deserted now and an aggressive mining company representative is pressuring Alma’s grandmother to sell. When Alma moves back into the home place with her niece to try to sort out what happened to her sister and what’s going on in her family she’s down the road from the ranch of the boyfriend she abandoned years ago and so necessarily but uneasily back in his life.

As a literary psychological thriller very grounded in its location,The Home Place reminds me of novels by Tana French and Julia Heaberlin, though the austere beauty of its Big Sky Midwestern setting is far from French’s Dublin. Full of tension and suspense and without an ounce of saccharin this is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. show less

Highest rating! This novel combines a brutal family saga with the infinite beauty of wide open Montana. The Terrebonnes are a large loving group with one escapee: Alma, who, after her parents were killed in a car crash, got a scholarship and got out. She's in Seattle, a corporate lawyer who's closing on a big deal when she is called home. In Billings are a brother, aunts, uncles, grandmother, a niece, and an ex boyfriend who all need her. And then there's the Home Place, the Terrebonne rural primitive home under aggressive attack by Big Coal. Back in Seattle is her big deal and her elegant boyfriend Jean-Marc.

There's family, a murder, suspects, and topping it all off, amazing descriptions of the land and what it takes to stay on it and show more keep it from predators.

Couldn't put it down. show less

The author weaves an exacting and challenging plot, with surprise switchbacks, as the main character tries to solve the increasing mystery of her sister's death and life.

The rural Montana she creates is one that Ivan Doig would have appreciated.

Most of the characters stay true, but readers may well miss Jean-Marc wit,
wish that Chance had found a Second True Love, and
maybe that Alma and Officer Ray Curtis had sent up some new sparks.

Great suspense!

When Alma Terrebonne receives word of her sister Vicky’s death, she immediately heads home to Montana where [predictably] she is pulled back into the issues of her troubled family. Was her sister’s death an accident or was it actually something more sinister? Who should raise Vicky’s daughter? What about the mining company seeking access to the family homestead? These are essential questions, but the core of this story is the understanding of home and of the things that truly define each of us.

Although Alma is the central character, she is not particularly sympathetic [or easy to like] and the other folks seem stereotypical, making it difficult for the reader to identify with this family’s narrative. The fairly predictable plot, show more in which too many elements remain unresolved, brings nothing new to the family saga milieu.

But the book’s true treasure lies in its lyrical depiction of the setting. Eloquent descriptions reveal the charm of the surroundings as they entrench the reader in the place of the story. It is for the richness and beauty of this landscape that the reader will keep turning the pages. show less