JUNIPER TREE BURNING

Striking just the right balance between lush language and graceful storytelling, this impressive first novel depicts a young woman seeking to escape the scars of her past.

Jennie has been running from her painful history for as long as she can remember. The struggle has made her bitter and cruel, a stone-hard woman who begins her story by leaving her kind husband and kidnapping her only friend. But as narrator of her own ugly-duckling tale, she knows she must back up to the beginning, to the time when there was no Jennie, only Juniper Tree Burning. Raised in a crumbling adobe hovel in rural New Mexico without a toilet or running water, Juniper is the child of Ray and Faith, back-to-nature hippies who join the cult-like Meeting Way and use Juniper and her younger brother, Sunny Boy Blue, as adversarial proxies in their own troubled marriage. The flashbacks evocatively portray childhood suffering, showing Juniper living in poverty, ostracized at school, and rejected by her own mother, who feels they are not astrologically compatible. Her only solace is found in her mother’s photo album, which holds idyllic images of her dead grandparents in Seattle and serves as fodder for the complex fairy tale of salvation she builds for herself and Sunny Boy Blue. As a teenager, Juniper finds a fairy godmother (a bored, wealthy older woman who enjoys the role of Pygmalion), is transformed into Jennie, and eventually goes to medical school. But the past catches up to her when Sunny Boy Blue, whom she has shunned as an adult, commits suicide in Seattle. She buys a truck and hijacks her friend, her destination Seattle and redemption, although both are harder to get to than she imagined.

Long’s simple technique of moving back and forth in time creates a vivid and emotionally honest work of art. A rare debut, written with confidence and expertise.