Set in Montana, the novel revolves around the deed of Samuel Faber, who, when facing the threat of losing his home, blows up the local courthouse. His paraplegic sister is shocked by this act of domestic terrorism, but still tries to maintain some faith in her beloved brother - although her life is further rattled when she befriends a pastor whose daughter was severely injured in the blast.

Hulse explores the possibility of human connection in the face of different types of injustice and trauma, juxtaposing the powers of faith and fate. Her writing is clear and subtle, the narrative smart and moving.

"Eden Mine" by S. M. Hulse is an overall well written story. I found myself really enjoying it despite my original misgivings. I didn't think I'd like it as much as I did.

i think that Ms. Hulse writes a really good story, her characters are great and it really pulls you into the world. I look forward to more from the author.

In Eden Mine, S.M. Hulse rolls out a story like unrolling a red carpet only the color would be blue or green as in nature. In the small town of Eden Mine, Montana, Jo and Samuel Faber are the surviving members of their family having lost their father to a mining accident and their widowed mother to domestic violence by her boyfriend. Both Samuel and Jo were also shot during the attack on their mother. Jo was left paralyzed from the waist down, leaving Samuel to discard his choices of a future to be Jo’s caretaker.

Both children traumatized by these events, only Samuel struggles with the concept of individual freedom as he clashes with the government. He goes too far when their home is about to be taken by imminent domain. His action is considered domestic terrorism, and although Jo is angry at him for what he did, she is loyal to him, knowing that he never meant to hurt anybody, just a building.

Out of the tragedy that occurred emerges a friendship of sorts between Jo and Asa Truth, the father of a child injured during the tragedy.

The story hits home during a time when American communities are being torn apart because of anger and dissatisfaction with a number of things in society including a pandemic and how individual citizens should act during such. All in all, it is a moving book.

I fell in love with S.M. Hulse’s writing style with her debut novel Black River. Her books are downers of sorts but the realism of her storytelling is profound. Besides novel writing, she has written stories that have appeared in Willow Springs, Witness, and Salamander. She is a horsewoman, which is evidenced in her writing about Jo and her mule that she is still able to ride even paralyzed. Hulse lives in the Pacific Northwest..

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting September 22, 2020.

I’d like to thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

What do you do when everything you know is suddenly turned upside down? Jo Faber and her brother Samuel are forced to leave their home. When she learns of the bomb she knows that things aren't right. She's tormented and must make descisions based on the violence she' experienced in her family that are very uncomfortable. Well-told and heart breaking, her story is one that in different circumstances others would choose differently.

This book felt like an onion to me, always peeling back layer by layer to expose more of the back story, and this technique held my interest throughout the book. The characters begin almost as caricatures, but as we read on, we learn more and more and they evolve into complex, nuanced people. A great read for anyone who thrives on character development.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

Memorable line:
This new house is higher on the hill than the one I shared with my brother, and farther south. The outline of the mountains is slightly different than I’m used to, the peaks over Eden and Gethsemane in equal balance through the window. I tilt my easel again, position my chair so i’m looking north until the meadows and mountains that were once mine fill the frame.

Amazingly well written. The language and dialogue were phenomenal. I couldn't put this down. This novel grabs your attention from the start. Eden Mine tells the story of a dying town, a family torn apart by violence, and the mental toll it takes on survivors. In the aftermath of a bombing, a sister has to comes to terms with her brother and herself. Her brother has to live with the decisions he has made and the animosity he feels towards others while reconciling the love he has for his sister. A father deals with the loss of his daughter and a small town sheriffs realizes he can't control much of anything.

While this basically describes any small town, set against the backdrop of the mountains out west and the descriptions the author adds for this small mining town, I really cant imagine it anywhere else. Superbly written and definitely a must read. Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC for review.

I picked this novel for it's ripped-from-the-headlines feel and this one does a good job of going into the personal from a broad overstory. Great characters here. Recommended.

A compelling read a story that could of been ripped out of today’s headlines.A sister whose brother bis accused of bonding the county courthouse.A town its people so vividly written the act that tore them apart.A book that I could not put down could not stop thinking about.#netgalley#fsg

What happens when you love the person but not his actions? This is the dilemma facing Jo, in this compelling and moving novel, when her brother blows up a local courthouse in a small Montana town as some sort of misguided protest against what he sees as government control. The aftermath of the bombing and its far-reaching consequences is explored in an intelligent, insightful and non-judgemental way and it makes for some riveting reading. From page one the reader is drawn into the narrative and the tension never lets up. Beautifully written, with not a wasted word, with complex and convincing characterisation, I found this book an immersive experience and its examination of family, friendship, loyalty and betrayal thought-provoking and heart-breaking. A small community already touched in so many ways by tragedy, this latest act somehow has to be absorbed. There’s no black and white here, no melodrama, just a portrait of people doing their best to deal with devastating loss. A timely and relevant book.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 11, 2020

Eden Mine is the story of two siblings, troubled in their separate ways, who are bound by a traumatic childhood event and the secrets they keep. Samuel planned to leave Prospect, his childhood home in Montana, to join the military with his friend Kev, and then to pursue a career as a veterinarian. After the traumatic event left Jo in a wheelchair, he abandoned his dreams so he could drive her to school and keep her safe. Apart from Jo, his only real attachment is to their inherited land, but the government is about to take their house so a highway can run through the property.

Samuel is seduced by militia groups that preach the sovereignty of haters rather than the unity of all, and by fringe websites that spew senseless conspiracy theories. He hates the government. He hates Jews. He believes people are better off “keeping to their own kind.” Jo reminds him that all the people responsible for their losses are, in fact, “their own kind.” Clouded by hatred and helplessness, Samuel plants an explosive in a courthouse, hoping to make a political statement but critically injuring a little girl in a storefront church across the street.

Jo never wanted to leave Prospect because she loves “the way the mountains cleave the sky, and the valley cradles its people.” She knows the land is poisoned and businesses are failing, but the beauty keeps her rooted. The losing fight against eminent domain is the force that threatens to uproot her. Jo blames herself for loving Prospect so much that she gave Samuel a reason to destroy the courthouse, and for loving Samuel so much that she didn’t realize he was “the kind of man who would.”

After the bomb explodes, Samuel hides in the mountains, not realizing that that a video camera had captured his image. Sheriff Hawkins has known Samuel and Jo forever. He knows that Jo knows where Samuel is hiding. It would be easier for Jo to tell him, particularly after the FBI comes calling, but her loyalty to Samuel compels her silence.

Ambiguous relationships dominate Eden Mine. The father of the injured girl is a preacher named Asa Truth who seems drawn to Jo, torn between his Christian desire to forgive and his fatherly hope that Jo will reveal Samuel’s location so that he can be punished. Hawkins has long been Jo’s friend, but he may need to exploit that friendship to find Samuel. A gallery owner admires Jo’s use of mud from the landscapes she paints as a pigment, incorporating the place into her image of the place, but in truth, the owner wants to market Jo’s status as the sister of the bomber to improve sales.

And then there are Jo and Samuel. Is the bond between them stronger than Jo’s belief that justice must be done? Is it stronger than Samuel’s instinct for self-preservation? Can Jo live with what Samuel did? Would it be a betrayal if she tells Hawkins where to find him? Would Samuel forgive his sister for betraying him? Can anyone forgive Samuel for what he did? Would Asa, a pastor, think the man who killed his daughter deserve forgiveness?

The struggle with faith is another key theme. Asa ponders familiar questions about believing in a god who brings so much suffering to his worshippers. Asa believes that, as a child, he healed a bicyclist who was struck by his father’s car, but he has never advertised himself as a faith healer. Asa is tormented because his daughter remains in a coma despite his faith, or perhaps because his shaken faith is insufficiently strong. He doesn’t understand why he had been given the ability to heal when he cannot use it to heal the person he loves.

Brief sections of the novel are told from Samuel’s point of view, but the narrative primarily belongs to Jo. Neither Jo nor Asa understand why they are drawn to each other, but the reader understands that they each need something that only the other can provide. S.M. Hulse makes it easy to empathize with both characters. Perhaps Samuel deserves no empathy, but Hulse makes it easy to understand why he became the kind of person he never intended to be. Too many people, the novel suggests, have been shaped by forces they do not understand; websites that preach division and paranoid hatred, militias that offer violence as a solution to nonexistent problems.

Eden Mine builds to a dramatic conclusion. The ending is guardedly hopeful, suggesting that it is never too late to find the will to change. The novel illustrates a growing disconnect between reality-based Americans and those whose fringe beliefs are a danger to themselves and to society, but it does so in a story that is personal and moving.

RECOMMENDED

"I don’t understand belief, why it comes to some people and not others, why tragedy strengthens it in some and shatters it in others."

Jo Faber and her older brother, Samuel, have lived in their Montana home their whole lives. It was settled in 1920 by their great-grandfather and it was supposed to stay in their family forever. Recently they received notification that their property is being taken by the government under eminent domain.

Jo and Samuel have already had a hard life. Their father is dead. They went through a terrible ordeal after that that left their mother dead and Jo a quadriplegic.

Now Samuel has disappeared and the local sheriff, who is a friend of brother and sister, comes to tell No that Samuel committed an act of terrorism, leaving people injured.

This is the second book by author Hulse I've read. BLACK RIVER was an excellent, though dark story, and this is too.

Relationships, love of the land, bad decisions, faith and the lack of it - all are intertwined in a complex tale of the "what ifs" in life.

I received this book from Farrar, Straus & Giroux through Edelweiss and Net Galley in the hopes that I would read it and I would leave an unbiased review.

The descriptions in this book are wonderful. I could practically feel the fresh , cold air of Montana. Vivid too, is the detailed depiction of the characters. Jo is the main character and narrator. Though paralyzed and in a wheelchair since she was a child, she is by no means weak. An artist, she is to be admired for her strength in dealing with life thanks to the help and protection of her brother, Samuel. Until he does the unthinkable and leaves her to deal with the police, the FBI, moving from the only home she has ever known, and basically having to reinvent her life. (I felt most sorry that she had to sell Lockjaw). The writing is excellent. My only quibble is my irritation with the popular trend of switching narrators without saying who is now talking. Drives me crazy.

Whenever there's a tragedy that makes headlines, I always think about the families of the 'bad guys'. How do they deal with the fact that someone they love has done something so horrible and unforgivable. This book gives us a glimpse into what that is like.

This isn't a feel-good book except for the way Jo manages to deal with her situation. There's no way everyone will come out a winner. But it's a thought-provoking and sensitive book and well worth reading.

This is a beautifully written tragedy that will linger in your mind. Jo and Samuel have been on their own since their mother was shot by her boyfriend on a horrifying night when a random gunshot paralyzed her from the waist down. Now, all these years later, they are about to lose their family home and land not to foreclosure but for a road. Samuel, who has raged but not acted for years, sets off a bomb at the courthouse- on a Sunday when no one should have been there or in the area but he did not know that a small church had recently moved in across the street. When he takes off to points unknown (although Jo knows in her heart where he is) Jo is left to deal with the FBI, the media, their friend Sheriff Hawkins, and packing up her home and selling their mule Lockjaw. She's an artist and Hulse does a wonderful job of making you see her paintings, and an even better job with the Montana landscape. There is so much to like about this novel, starting with Jo. The characters come right off the page and you can feel their pain. Asa, the preacher and father of a child grievously wounded, periodically offers his perspective (although I don't think the novel benefited from this- but it isn't often). Samuel's letter to Jo gives you insight into him outside her perceptions. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. It's not a feel good book at all but I can't recommend this highly enough.

Taut writing, compelling plot, strong sense of place, and relatable characters are all elements that make up this terrific read set in rural Montana about a young woman whose beloved brother is implicated in a bombing of the county courthouse. The first-person narrative with short first-person perspectives by two additional characters is particularly effective. This is rich in discussion possibilities for book groups.
My full review is here: https://readersforecast.blogspot.com/2020/02/eden-mine-by-sm-hulse.html
Also published in its entirety in the 2/8/2020 edition of The Daily News (Batavia, NY).

"As a child I thought people were haunted by ghosts, but I understand now that the senses can haunt." - S.M. Hulse in Eden Mine

I was very much looking forward to reading this book because I loved S. M. Hulse's prose in Black River, and boy was I not disappointed. Eden Mine is a fantastic novel that is going to suck in the reader to vivid tale Hulse paints. Filled with damaged characters, the story centers on Jo, a handicap young Montana women whose brother is on the run from the law. Jo tries to find answers for her brother's alleged actions, all the while she tries to find answers to how to continue her own life at the current crossroad it is in. Along the way, Jo will challenge and focus on growing her faith, her art, and her choices in life. This book was a quick read because I was mesmerized by the illustrative tale Hulse painted for me.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and publisher for providing me with an ARC to review.

I was a big fan of S. M. Hulse's debut novel Black River and have been eagerly awaiting Eden Mine. Hulse has a magic pen that creates a vivid sense of place and complex, conflicted characters embroiled in devastating moral choices.

Tall Montana mountains on the east side casts their shadows on the valley until near noon. The silver mines left their legacy of polluted water and broken families. Jo and Samuel Faber's grandfather worked the mines for thirty years to afford a plot of land at retirement. Their father died in a mine collapse.

Eden on one side, Gethsemane on the other, the mountains define Jo's world, a paradise she loves, haunted by ghastly memories of her mother's brutal murder. Her brother Samuel had hoped to leave this dying town. Instead, he became Jo's protector, her guardian. For when the disgruntled lover murdered their mother, a bullet also struck Jo.

The orphaned siblings lost too much, including their faith, but they had each other. Samuel, Jo knew, would always protect her. Jo enjoyed "casting the world in its best light" in her paintings that she sold at the gas station gift shop, and she also saw her brother in his best light, ignoring his darker attractions and anger.

The first sentence in the novel sets the conflict: "My brother's bomb explodes at 10:16 on a late April Sunday morning." Unable to fight the takeover of their family land through eminent domain, Samuel acts out. He never planned for anyone to be hurt--that's why he bombed the courthouse on a Sunday morning.

Samuel did not know that a church met in a storefront across the street. People were hurt, including the pastor's daughter.

Sheriff Hawkins comes to Jo. He has protected the siblings since their mother's death. He knows Jo could help the law find her brother. He knows the truth of that awful day when their mother's murderer was beaten to death.

Alone to face the looming deadline to vacate their family home, besieged by law and paparazzi, Jo finds aid from an unexpected person: Pastor Asa whose daughter lays in the hospital, a victim of Samuel's bomb. He is adrift spiritually, his faith unable to explain or cure what has happened.

Samuel agonizes over how he came to come to this point. His biggest choice is yet to come. Can he change?

Jo loves her brother. How long can she remain silent about what she knows?

Pastor Asa rails at his impotence to heal what is broken, the wife who died young, his comatose daughter. He is in the desert, hoping to find the still waters of faith again.

Hulse has again offered a novel that satisfies on so many levels: the propulsive plot, characters who are sympathetic and conflicted and real, a landscape painted in detailed richness, and the universal and timeless theme of being lost and seeking forgiveness and faith.

I was given a free book by the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Eden Mine is a fine title which can be interpreted in multiple ways. The Faber family has owned the same acreage in Idaho, near enough to the border that their barn and house are the last structures one sees on their way north to Canada. And the remaining Fabers, Samuel and his sister Jo, are being forced to leave because of a proposed road. All their history is bound up in this, their personal eden, which is downstream from the Eden Mine, in which their father lost his life and which has polluted that stream. When we first meet Jo, she is packing up boxes for the impending move, believing Samuel is on his way to Wyoming in search of work. Told mostly from her point of view, we learn of Samuel's actions, her inner life drives the greatest parts of this story. This is a contemplative novel, not a page turner except in rare instances, in which the importance and nature of faith and relationships are tested. Much of the drama, whether in the past or present, happens offstage.

Jo is an amazing character. Although wheelchair bound, she is self-sufficient, intelligent, loyal, and has a remarkable original talent for painting. She is one of those characters you meet in a book that you wish you could meet in real life.

Thank you for the opportunity to read/review Eden Mine, the second (as far as I know) offering by S.M. Hulse. Hulse has again done an excellent job, capturing the humanity of the characters and weaving an engaging tale. While this is not a book I'll recommend to my students for coursework, it's certainly one I'll suggest for their personal reading lists.