Reading Jean Thompson’s The Year We Left Home is a little like surviving a year in the Midwest. If you come here in the late spring it’s all glorious warm days and cool nights and bursting flowers and the smell of lilacs. It makes you wonder why everyone on the planet doesn’t want to live here.

Starting this latest novel/series of linked short stories feels a little like that. The book opens in 1973 with seventeen-year-old Ryan Erikson attending his sister’s wedding. The Eriksons are a tall Norwegian breed and possess the kind of stoicism Midwesterners are known for. While they often possess the Midwestern traits that have turned us into punchlines, in Thompson’s hands they are more than the stereotype.

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