Hannah and Matthew eyed each other as children, fell in love as young adults, quit the deadened East and headed West to homestead on the prairie. There is a sod house. Crops, cows, children. A berdache (a North American Aboriginal male, either celibate or homosexual, who assumes an intermediate social role between that of men and women in Aboriginal society). Passion in furrows. Women in daylight and in the dark of night. There are three men and one woman. A man who loves Hannah and the Horizon. A man who loves horses and pregnant women. A young man who loves and hates in the same person.
Seasoning Fever is Little House on the Prairie had it been written by Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner or Cormac McCarthy. In limpid, dreamlike prose, Susan Kerslake serves up an epic myth of the West with perceptiveness both wise and innocent. All of life’s elemental zest is here: deprivation and survival, love and lust, the magical and the mundane and the sometimes unbridgeable distance between male and female. No simple tale of prairie homesteading, this long-awaited novel imposes the ingenuous resource of a soaring poetic mind upon the grass ocean of an inscrutable land. If the measure of such fusion is an assessment of spirit, then the spirit of Seasoning Fever is original and triumphant.