Where She Went — Kate Walbert

“Incisive, eerie, sensual, and threatening.” -- The Village Voice
 
The linked stories in Kate Walbert's debut collection Where She Went examine the very contemporary predicament of a family without geographic roots. The first half of the book chronicles the life of Marion Clark, a company wife who repeatedly packs the household and accompanies her husband around the globe with a “melancholy view before her of what seemed like endless houses with endless garages and endless kitchen windows.” In the stories that follow, her adult daughter Rebecca continues the family legacy of wandering, traveling farther and farther afield, seeking to fulfill her mother's thwarted aspirations. But Rebecca's world is one viewed with a slightly off-kilter eye, one that invokes Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, Mohammed's faithful followers at Topkapi Palace, as well as the landscapes of Italy and Jamaica, Istanbul, and Paris. This mother and daughter, each uniquely of her own generation, remain locked, firmly, in longing -- Marion with little free will, and Rebecca with an excess of free spirit.
 
From a patchwork of communication that unfolds between Marion and Rebecca, Walbert creates a narrative that is both fractured and lyrical. Where She Went is an epic for out times -- an odyssey that takes home on the road.