Heart Spring Mountain moves between many different perspectives and characters, which sometimes makes the novel a confusing panache of voices. Past and the present collide, precipitated by a Hurricane Irene as it leaves a swath of destruction up the New England coast. In 2011, Vale is living in New Orleans, tending bar three nights a week and working as a stripper the other two. She's been watching the storm on television as it downs trees, floods rivers, and causes seven deaths. Vale is plunged into her own river of grief when she gets a call from Aunt Deb, who tells her that her mother, Bonnie, has vanished. She walked out into the storm eight hours ago. She was seen by a neighbor walking towards a bridge that collapsed, and she hasn't been home since.

Vale was 16 the first time she saw her mother with a needle in her arm, lying in her clawfoot tub in her blue-walled apartment. While the police are surprised that Deb's body is still missing, Vale refuses to give up hope that her mother will return alive. She decides to return to Vermont and her mother's apartment above the river where Bonnie's junkie boyfriend lives. In desperation she searches, going to Hazel's old farmhouse, where Bonnie grew up and where Vale's ancestors have lived for two hundred years. Exploring the ruins of the green bridge, Vale keeps her eyes peeled. She thinks of her family members: Stephen, Hazel's son; Hazel herself; and Bonnie, her body perhaps now rotting in the creek water.

MacArthur's lyrical novel suggests that there is nothing truer than the relationship between life and death: the life of exile and a life lived off the grid. Heart Spring Mountain invites us to abandon all that is familiar and calls us to risk the unsettling, exhilarating journey toward where we've always known we came from. Bonnie's tragedy unfolds in a series of vignettes between Vale, Aunt Deb, and the previous generations of women--especially Lena, Bonnie's mother, who in 1956, lives with her one-eyed owl in a barn in the field in the woods: "I'm like the three-legged coyote that lives nearby, the one that crosses the field in the evening sticks to the darker edges."

MacArthur offers a brutal narration of an often-rural poverty-stricken worl, composed of ex-hippies who live off the land while loving the natural beauty of the world around them--the mountain with its cellar holes, springs, creeks, and wildflowers. The landscape often feels like an extension of Deb's own living body. She marvels at way the seasons create a rhythm to her days and her years. Deb tells Vale about Hazel and her spottiness, about finding her nightgown in the middle of the room, and her steady deterioration in which time is impossibly tangled. Now it's just Bonnie and Hazel in her the old house at the back of the field.

Hazel tells us about Lex Starkweather and the first time Lex loved her. It was August, a dance at the town hall, not the man her father would have chosen for her: "a fiddle player, quiet, aloof, magnetic, from a poor family on the edge of town." Meanwhile, in Hazel's ramshackle cabin, the green mottled walls speak to Vale and disturb her ability to feel at peace in the world. Vale thinks of Lena's life up there on the hill, the simplicity of it: the bottles stuffed with feathers, the skulls on her windowsill, the "philosophical statement of her living." While thematically the book is inspired by the writings of American naturalist Henry Thoreau, the novel delves into our "shadow stories," Thoreau's idea that our ancestors can become blueprints for how to be in the world.

MacArthur has a poetic, lyrical style, yet she can't stop the story from becoming a bit tedious. The plot dribbles away, and we are left with few twists in Vale's family tree that for me just became too difficult to unravel. Overwritten and too long, the scenes seemed repetitive in providing characterization of Hazel, Deb, Lena, and Stephen. Still, Vale's story becomes more relevant and much more exciting as she clings to the hope that Bonnie is still alive.