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Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (May 14, 2019)

“The Desert Sky Before Us is a marvel. A vital, profound story of the aftermath of loss, and of the terrors and illuminations of love.” —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

From award-winning author Anne Valente comes this poignant and unforgettable literary novel of two estranged sisters—one, a former racecar driver and the other a recently-released prisoner—who embark on a road trip together to complete the scavenger hunt their mother designed for them before her death.

When Billie is released from a correctional facility in Decatur, her sister Rhiannon is there to meet her, even though the two haven’t seen each other in months. Painful secrets and numerous unspoken betrayals linger between them—but most agonizing is the sudden passing of their mother, a renowned paleontologist.

Rhiannon and Billie must overcome their differences as they set off on a road trip west, following the breadcrumb-trail of their late mother’s scavenger hunt, a sort of second funeral she planned in her final days. The sisters know the trail will end in Utah at the famous Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry, where their mother spent her career researching dinosaur fossils. But the seemingly endless days on the road soon take their toll, forcing Rhiannon and Billie to confront their hostilities and revisit old memories—both good and bad.

As they travel across the heart of America, and as a series of plane crashes in the news make their journey all the more urgent, the two sisters begin to rediscover each other and to uncover their late mother’s veiled second life, taking them on an unexpected emotional journey inward—and forcing them to come to terms with their own choices in life.

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

Rhiannon knows the word sorry will never find its way from Billie’s throat.

She watches him and knows that her anger with him is nothing compared to the heavy weight of what she’s dragged around a prison cell for six years and across so many highways to this place, this moment: that in the end she is most disappointed in herself, no one else.

My Review:

There was family drama aplenty as well as a long and arduous road-trip full of broody tension and uncertainty as two sisters followed the bread-crumb path across the country that their recently deceased mother had set for them in her sparse journal – a journal that gave no explanations, just GPS coordinates and poorly drawn images. I was riddled with curiosity yet increasingly impatient with the incrementally slow pace and confounding nature of their discoveries.

Gradually old resentments, lies, secrets, and jealousies unspooled as the tedium and miles were racked up.   The main characters were hard for me to care for, as they were both stalled and discontent with their lives and extremely closed off, annoyingly so. Billie was an immature screw up with an innate sense of inadequacy and unpredictable volatile and impulsive behavioral reactions. These were not individuals I would willingly choose to spend my time with, yet I was curious about the mysterious clues and geocaching.

I confess – I struggled valiantly with this ponderously slow and angsty, yet informative and pensive book.   The book contained a thought-provoking story yet used far too many pages in the telling and left me with a sense of emotional exhaustion and a bitter sense of dissatisfaction with the ending, but maybe I just didn’t catch all the ethereal connections. I did glean an awareness of issues and phenomenon I had never before encountered and felt the need to hit Mr. Google for additional research on clear-air turbulence and The Spiral Jetty. I may never fly again!

Anne Valente’s first short-story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize. Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and the Chicago Tribune, and her essays appear in The Believer and the Washington Post. Originally from St. Louis, she teaches creative writing and literature at Hamilton College.

Find out more about Anne at her website.