My Rating:

3.5

Favorite Quotes:

Rhiannon knows the word sorry will never find its way from Billie’s throat.

She watches him and knows that her anger with him is nothing compared to the heavy weight of what she’s dragged around a prison cell for six years and across so many highways to this place, this moment: that in the end she is most disappointed in herself, no one else.


My Review:

There was family drama aplenty as well as a long and arduous road-trip full of broody tension and uncertainty as two sisters followed the bread-crumb path across the country that their recently deceased mother had set for them in her sparse journal - a journal that gave no explanations, just GPS coordinates and poorly drawn images. I was riddled with curiosity yet increasingly impatient with the incrementally slow pace and confounding nature of their discoveries.

Gradually old resentments, lies, secrets, and jealousies unspooled as the tedium and miles were racked up. The main characters were hard for me to care for, as they were both stalled and discontent with their lives and extremely closed off, annoyingly so. Billie was an immature screw up with an innate sense of inadequacy and unpredictable volatile and impulsive behavioral reactions. These were not individuals I would willingly choose to spend my time with, yet I was curious about the mysterious clues and geocaching.

I confess – I struggled valiantly with this ponderously slow and angsty, yet informative and pensive book. The book contained a thought-provoking story yet used far too many pages in the telling and left me with a sense of emotional exhaustion and a bitter sense of dissatisfaction with the ending, but maybe I just didn’t catch all the ethereal connections. I did glean an awareness of issues and phenomenon I had never before encountered and felt the need to hit Mr. Google for additional research on clear-air turbulence and The Spiral Jetty. I may never fly again!

Anne Valente has found a new fan in me! The Desert Sky Before Us is a moving novel centered around two sisters as they embark on a 2 week road trip. Their late mother’s last wish is that Billie and Rhiannon follow a scavenger hunt she has created before dying. Throughout their journey the women peal back the layers of themselves and genuinely bond and begin see each other for their true selves for the first time. Not only that, they both learn A LOT of things they didn’t know about their mother!

Wow, Anne Valente masterfully tackled so many difficult topics in this novel! My heart went out to Billie and Rhiannon for all that had been misconceived over the years! I really enjoyed how Anne Valente added a lot of mystery, I felt that really kept me on the hook. I also definitely know more about dinosaurs after reading The Desert Sky Before Us! I’m excited to read more from Anne Valente in the future.