Go Away Home
Bodensteiner’s charming debut novel opens in 1913 Iowa and follows in intimate, winningly human detail the life and development of young Liddie Treadway, who starts out energetic but naive (when she learns of her sister’s pregnancy, early on in the book, she is confused, since her sister is not married). She is eager to transcend the limitations her small-town rural world unthinkingly places on women, and her progress from simple home life to the burgeoning world of photography.
Bodensteiner skillfully blends the events of the wider world into the talk and gossip of small-town Iowa; when a character tentatively laments America’s involvement in the First World War, for instance, she is told, “The Kaiser didn’t leave room for talking. Not when he promised Mexico he’d give ’em half the American southwest if they joined him.”
The secondary characters are all well fleshed-out, especially the other female characters, who are smoothly used to illustrate many aspects of women’s lives in the first half of the 20th century. The result is a memorable and warmly small-focus novel that repays re-reading.
