Novel by the author of "Snow Falling On Cedars", a novel about a teenage girl who claims to see the Virgin Mary.

Postal release to goatgrrl in British Columbia.

Received from Oldbroad as a swap for Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Alias Grace. Thanks so much for sharing this book with me (a hardcover in beautiful condition!). I promise I'll take good care of it and make sure it ends up in the hands of someone else who will enjoy it. Best wishes to my terrific BookCrossing neighbour in Washington State, from sunny New Westminster.

Oldbroad, you gave me a wonderful gift when you sent me this book, and I didn’t find out how wonderful until just this week. Thank you, thank you.

Our Lady of the Forest is the poignant story of fifteen year old Ann Holmes, who lives in a canvas tent in a campground in the fictional town of North Fork, Washington (somewhere near the real-life town of Marysville). A runaway who makes her living picking and selling chanterelle mushrooms, Ann passes her non-working hours reading a pocket catechism by firelight. She smells of "wood smoke, leaves, and rank clothes", she wheezes with asthma and flu, and "[o]n most mornings her jeans [are] wet with the rain or dew transferred from the fronds of ferns and her hands look pink and raw". One November afternoon in the foggy woods of North Fork, the Virgin Mary appears to her, as clear as day.

A friend recommended I read Our Lady because of my one-time connection with a community of "Ann Holmeses" living a few hundred kilometers north of North Fork, on a small island in the Strait of Georgia (see map at left), just across the Washington/BC border. Just like the community of North Fork, in BC, sub-cultures like Ann’s campground-dwelling, mushroom-picking tribe are mired in low-grade cultural warfare with the unemployed loggers and fishers with whom they edgily share local pubs and coffee-shops. In the grossest stereotypical terms, battle lines are drawn between "hippies" and "rednecks", with little recognition for ideological grey areas in between. Each side blames the other for destruction -- of the environment, of their livelihoods, of Life As We Knew It. Outside the affluent cities of Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC, many folks live in poverty (but for the thriving marijuana crop and the countless jobs it generates, many would be starving). Living in a canvas tent in November -- like Ann -- or the back of a pick-up -- like the shadowy character of Tom Cross -- is not as unusual as many would like to think.

What would the promise of salvation mean to such a community? How illusory would it have to be for people to avoid the temptation to clutch at that straw? And how can a more garden-variety capacity for compassion, reconciliation and truth-telling be encouraged to flourish in an atmosphere so divided, and so without hope. Even before one of Guterson’s characters quotes from T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi, I was thinking about Eliot’s beautiful final line: "I should be glad of another death". As Guterson makes so heartbreakingly clear, these births are hard.