For her second novel, St. Louis native Anne Valente is tackling something a bit lighter but with just as much mastery. The author of the emotional tale of a fictional school shooting, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, knew that this time out, she wanted to write a road trip narrative featuring women.
“So many of the road narratives that I’ve read have not done that,” says Valente, who was inspired by her trip moving from Ohio to New Mexico at the time. “I visited a couple of the places, like Arches National Park and Carlsbad Caverns, so I wrote some of them into the narrative, and that’s how I ended up building the route.”
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Her resulting novel, The Desert Sky Before Us, follows two sisters, Rhiannon and Billie, who set out on a road trip designed for them by their late paleontologist mother in a sort of second funeral or memorial. Dealing with themes of loss, identity, sisterhood, and abuse, the book begins as the sisters embark from central Illinois on their journey, a catalyst to understanding their mother and themselves. The goal: the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in Utah, where Mom spent most of her career.
Along the way, the trip takes them to places both unexpected and familiar (the first stop is our own Forest Park). They uncover buried memories, learning more about their mother’s work in paleontology as they face their own pasts. Valente, who now lives in New York, clearly fell in love with the landscapes of the West. As for the Midwest? “I still have a vested interest in writing about a place that I love,” she says.
Valente discusses her new novel at 7 p.m. May 14 at Left Bank Books.
