A Family’s Unsolved Mystery
True fiction based on the life of Olena Hogenson Erickson through memories and imagination of her granddaughter. Families are complex, puzzling, mysterious, sometimes admired, and sometimes disliked. Some memories are recalled with love and gratitude, others with feelings of fear and sometimes dislike. Always there was something hinted at, sometimes just whispered, not quite talked about. Mysterious—but definitely there. Her grandmother is central, a silent figure full of sadness and loss, but beneath the surface was a world of other unresolved emotions. It is dedicated to Olena and all silenced women. Solidly written, this moving story begins at the end with a dying woman’s last moments in the presence of her grown children. As the story is explained by the woman’s granddaughter, retrospectively unfolding, it spans the life of this Norwegian-American woman in newly settled Minnesota. Olena Hogenson Erickson was a bride left standing at the altar by a groom who mysteriously vanished and Olena’s future is permanently altered by all that follows that momentous humiliation. The relationships between characters are stirring. Using the Bible’s verses in Ecclesiastes “a time for every purpose under heaven,” the chapters weave a tale of loss and mystery. Olena’s birthplace was Choice, MN—a cruel irony at play in this story about the death of a young woman’s American dream of equality and fulfillment, and her loveless marriage to the older Cornelius who was her father’s farmhand. Each chapter ends leaving the reader’s interest piqued, making this book hard to put down.
