Today Kate surprised me with a letter-...She asks so many questions. So point-blank. I had to laugh because people have wanted to grill me like that for yearsI still catch people looking out of the corners of their eyes at me, trying to judge is what they've heard can possibly be true... Maybe it's time, maybe I can tell this.
Gabrielle Bissonette, a hunter, is a character of uncommon depth and determination. Her way of life intrudes upon what has traditionally been male territory. Rickey Gard Diamond creates an extraordinary heroine, one who redefines what it means to be fully human. She has the strength and courage to discover "second sight," reclaiming painful memories, and seeing them anew in her quest for both responsibility and new direction.
Gabrielle returns us to 1973, when family violence was still largely unchallenged, and Vietnam's violence was radically dividing American families and communities. Like today, it was a time of changing perceptions, with sexual and economic differences, power, knowledge, and the environment at stake.
Gabrielle struggles to untangle her ten-year silence. Her story is complex, woven of many threads. Caught in a web of violence, along with her older brother, Robert, and Valley, his young bride, she wrestles with memories of hunting and vegetarianism, the nature of violence and definitions of victim, the links between local storytelling and literature, between rural and academic dialects, the impact of Ernest Hemingway's work versus the invisibility of women's.
Spellbinding, her tale gathers speed as it is read and has lasting revelations. Gabrielle, Robert, and Valley will continue to live in the reader's mind long after the book is finished. As is parts of the American character itself, the play out our most personal, unreconciled conflicts. With Second Sight, Rickey Gard Diamond has written a novel that bridges chasms, naming life in all its terrible fullness, to find hope at the heart of tragedy.
