Weave Me a Crooked Basket
A Novel
by Charles Goodrich
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Pub Date Oct 10 2023 | Archive Date Sep 20 2023
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Description
It’s the summer of 2008, and thirty-five-year-old Ursula Tunder, reeling from the breakup of a bad marriage, has abandoned her career as a botanist and moved home to the family farm to start a wholesale garden-plant greenhouse, and, perhaps more importantly, to care for her ailing father, Joe. Her younger brother, Bodie, now that a shoulder injury has ended his NFL career, comes home as well, to try his hand at organic farming. Their land at the edge of a prosperous college town is coveted by developers. Ursula wants to sell the farm to Camas Valley State University, which has promised to create a research facility on the land, but Bodie and his idealistic wife, Fleece, are committed to farming.
Enter Nu, Ursula and Bodie’s Vietnamese-American cousin by adoption, and an up-and-coming visual artist. When Nu gets arrested after a fight with a pair of dirt bikers, Joe persuades him to take refuge at the Tunder farm. Nu gets pressed into service helping Bodie with farm chores and taking care of Joe, so Ursula seizes the opportunity to get away from the farm, accepting a temporary job surveying native plants in the Cascades. But when Joe’s health plummets and Bodie’s finances crash, Ursula abandons her summer job to return home once again.
Facing bankruptcy, Ursula, Bodie, and Nu enlist a ragtag troupe of land-defenders in a festival of resistance in a last-ditch effort to save a way of life that may disappear forever.
Advance Praise
“You can tell that Charles Goodrich is both a gifted writer and an attentive gardener, giving us a heartening story that is grounded in the way that land and people can heal each other. He has cultivated characters so memorable that I missed them as soon as I read the last page.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweet Grass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants
“Goodrich masterfully weaves an intricate and deeply satisfying story. It’s a beautiful book in its rich language and profoundly honest voice—funny and smart in its observations. Weave Me a Crooked Basket is a thrilling read and a much-needed antidote to our time, reminding us we can fully embrace the power of the human spirit.”
—Keith Scribner, author of Old Newgate Road, winner of the 2020 Connecticut Book Award
“I haven’t read a novel in a long time that felt this hopeful, this authentic in feeling, in landscape, in the complexities of the lives of its people—ordinary people who are not only farmers and gardeners but artists and biologists and immigrants, wives and husbands, sisters and brothers. It’s a marvelous book, written with immense compassion and honesty, insight and detail. I loved it.”
—Molly Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses
“Weave Me a Crooked Basket testifies to a potent vision—small farmers, artists, tattooed hair-stylists, footballers, yoga teachers, schoolkids, and cranky octogenarians rising in community when the engines of Corporate Greed come rumbling their way.”
—John Daniel, author of Gifted and Lighted Distances
“Charles Goodrich’s writing shines with a deep knowledge of the land and climate of Western Oregon. His story demonstrates an overall ethic of care for this land. Read Weave Me a Crooked Basket—for the characters you will know and love, and for the way Goodrich brings the place alive.”
—Lawrence Coates, professor of English and creative writing, Bowling Green State University, author of The Goodbye House: A Novel
“Weave Me a Crooked Basket is the good news we've been waiting for: community matters, love heals, care and attention are the greatest of gifts, art is wonderfully re-arranging, the rich soil, well-tended, holds us all, and the work, despite our griefs, goes on. Charles Goodrich has written an exceptionally beautiful, life-giving novel.”
—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers
Marketing Plan
• Creative resistance to encroaching development
• Support for small farms and gardens
• The nature of family
• Place-making as political stance
• Creative resistance to encroaching development
• Support for small farms and gardens
• The nature of family
• Place-making as political stance
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781647791223 |
| PRICE | $22.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 224 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Reviewer 47558
Thanks to NetGalley and University of Nevada Press for the opportunity to read Weave Me A Crooked Basket by Charles Goodrich, a hopeful story with memorable characters.
LindaH Z, Bookseller
The power of family , community, and growing - actual and metaphorical.
A small family farm in the Northwest in 2nd generation transition. The author clearly knows the horticulture of both greenhouse gardening and organic farming and makes this solid story-telling fiction via original characters with interior lives: retired NFL footballer trying to build a farm business to serve the community , a mid 30's woman at odds with her brother, a nasty divorce, working the green house to stabilize her life while helping her father through end stage cancer, an adopted brother of Vietnamese heritage in refuge at the arm from a nasty run in with bikers and legal battle, who is the artist that envisions earthworks, mapping, tying art to the land, as plumber, painter, sculptor learning to weave from his indigenous sister in law, and a bringing together a community of protest against university/developer takeover by building an "art farm".
I am drawn to the definition of place, personhood, family, all in relationship to the responsibility of land management. With all the bonds and battles, this is ultimately a story of finding belonging despite change and loss and renewal that life/nature will always provide.
sara a, Reviewer
I have to say that I always enjoy the books that come from the University of Nevada Press. You get good quality writing with a solid story line.
Weave Me a Crooked Basket has lovable imperfect characters that have just enough quirk to make them interesting yet still believable. I loved how art and farming played such a big role in this story and the arc of the story was very satisfying. As you read, you feel more and more immersed and hopeful for a happy, but not sappy ending. And that is just what you get.
Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. Really nicely done and enjoyable to read.
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