Book Report: Stars Go Blue

30. Laura Pritchett, Stars Go Blue (2014) (11/10/18)

This is a grace-filled story of a family in crisis—very quiet crisis, but crisis nonetheless. It is told, mostly, in alternating chapters that cover the point of view of, respectively, 70-something Ben Cross, a Colorado rancher recently diagnosed with dementia, possibly Alzheimer's, and his wife, Renny. We are made privy to the way Ben's mind is ceasing to function, to make sense of the world, and to Renny's weary fury—not at Ben (though maybe a little at Ben, or at the lack of control that is tearing them down and apart), but more at the death of their daughter Rachel at her husband's hands some years earlier, a death that led to Ben and Renny's semi-estrangement at opposite ends of their ranch. Or maybe her fury is just at life, writ large. Though recently, Renny has moved Ben back to the main house, where she can keep an eye on him. There is another daughter, Carolyn, and several grandchildren, especially quiet Jess, so much like Ben. There is a sheriff's deputy, a large-animal veterinarian. Eventually, there is a pregnant waitress, and a meth head. And Rachel's killer, newly released from prison. And there is a blizzard.

Courage and water are two strong themes of the book. "Courage is fear that has said its prayers," Ben muses, as he summons up his own prayers, his own courage, to do the unthinkable. As for water, it appears in all sorts of guises: as "fields [of] poured ice, rippled and waved," at the very start of the book; as watersheds; as irrigation and rainfall; as rivers of electricity in the brain; as snow; even as necessary absence, since dry days are crucial to getting the hay baled and stored.

In one Renny passage, she

wants to say something about a new important thought she has had. How spirits go up, toward the sky, but souls go down, toward the earth and toward water. Water runs down because the earth pulls it that way. The soul wants to go down, too, and grow roots, run like a river. And that maybe death is like water running backward. Could that be?

There are many lovely, lyric paragraphs with water circling as a metaphor—for hope, for reality, for necessity.

The title of the book is explained in a couple of passages, such as this:

Tell you what I'm gonna do, see.
 I often hear myself saying it, even now.
 I say it to the river, I say it to the water that designs its own path as it spreads across the fields. I say it to water snaking down the irrigation ditch for the first time, and spreading across the field right as the sun is setting and hitting it just right, making it look like a sparkling sea. I say it to the beautiful earth, to the beautiful moon. I say it because to me, he was like a blue star, the kind that dies in the most spectacular of ways. Not, like the others, by shrinking up. But by exploding.

But overall, it's a book about real people with complicated feelings and attachments. Ultimately, it's a novel of hope and love.