Basket Maker »

Isolation suits young Sarah Graves. As long as she doesn t enlarge her world, her secret is safe; and as long as her secret is safe, her world is not likely to split apart. But when she learns that a boy at school has suffered terrible burns over most of his body, she cannot help but envision a friendship based on a mutual knowledge of unspeakable pain.

THE BASKET MAKER deftly weaves together the story of Sarah and Trent's uneasy alliance with the stories of the adults in their lives. There is a mother who worships academic knowledge and yet has so shut herself off from the world around her that she can no longer properly care for her children; another mother whose desire to protect her ailing child nearly causes her to push away what he needs most to heal; an old woman whose inability to act is tied to embarrassment regarding the circumstances of her husband's death; the ghost of an Indian chief whose unresolved grief has kept him from crossing over into the spirit world; and a father who has been swallowed whole by his own lack of nurture.

With great intelligence and a delicate touch, Kate Niles creates a world in which love, passion, abuse, and the possibility of healing all coexist. The forces that shape us and drive us forward are as compelling here as the forces of nature that once shaped the American southwest region where the story unfolds. THE BASKET MAKER takes hold of its subject fearlessly-and dazzles the reader with its ability to immerse it in grace and light.

Kirkus Reviews

A ten-year-old girl finds a way out of her abusive home. Sarah's father routinely rapes her, and her mother only occasionally rouses from spectacular self-absorption in order to reassert an adult woman's sexual power. Envious of their parents' toxic focus on his sister, younger brother Ricky rebuffs Sarah's attempts to ally herself with him, and the family moves so often (both parents are professors) that she has no chance to find other champions. When they relocate once again, this time to Colorado, Sarah ends up talking to Ouray, a bitter Ute chief who died in 1880 (he's listening anyway), whose skeleton she discovered in the mountains near her house. She also befriends Trent, a classmate badly burned in a recent schoolyard accident. Slowly, the group that will save her begins to draw together: Trent's mother, Sarah's elderly neighbor Maddy, even the San Juan mountains and Ouray's surprisingly energetic ghost. All of the characters in this Nixon-era story are hobbled by powerlessness or loss; Trent's family is still frayed in the aftermath of his injury, her husband's suicide convinced Maddy she's helpless and irrelevant, and Ouray remains tethered to this world by a host of old grudges. But as they discover what's happening in her house, the characters individually conquer their own demons as well as Sarah's. Poet Niles has a nuanced understanding of the psychological fallout from sexual abuse, though her depiction of it tends to be clunky. The author's attempt to render Sarah's ordeal and emotional confusion in a childlike voice often seems coy and even disingenuous, but in a few fine passages Sarah describes her abuse in bleak, detached terms to powerful effect. Her furious brotherand competitive mother are lightly drawn but alarmingly vivid. Her father, regrettably, is more a list of traits than a full character, and his showdown with Ouray-ghost story meets after-school special-feels contrived. A compact, earnest debut: heartfelt, but frequently tin-eared. $35,000 ad/promo; author tour