“Tracking the Ariadne’s Thread in Burning of the Marriage Hat”

Everything starts with the visit of an apparition. The main character, Katherine, recognizes the specter as her grandmother Naomi who askd for help and practically pushes her to go to Wyoming where her family comes from, to find the truth about her death. When she travels to Wyoming, Katherine revives her memories as a child, adolescent, as a single mother, and as a contemporary independent woman. She finds out that the truth about Naomi’s death is not easy to uncover because there is a long and intricate story of family denial. On this trip, the writer shows echoes of the turbulent social changes in the United States during the 20th century.

The protagonist starts her journey from San Francisco on July 28, 1998, two years after the grandmother’s manifestation asking for help and telling her to go to Wyoming. By the end of the book the date is July 30th 1998. The story line develops chronologically during these two days. But the novel goes back and forth in time through more than one hundred years before the nineties, telling the story of a family in the voice of this woman Katherine. Different moments and writing styles—flashbacks, descriptions, and dialogues—show the protagonist debating among four generations while she is dealing with her present. Finally she uncovers the truth but finds some new questions.

The writing of Burning of a Marriage Hat is very engaging. The whole book is structured using very dynamic flashback stories that inform the reader about the protagonist’s life. Even if Katherine is the only narrator, there is a feeling of a choral story, a generational tale written in an amazing and puzzling style, where the reader knows many things at the same time and understands things as they come, feeling all the stimulus in unison with the protagonist. An attractive element in this vigorous manner of narrating is how Benshoof-Holler manages to put in context Katherine’s story with the social and cultural transformations through the years without loosing the intrigue generated since the very beginning, when the grandmother’s ghost appears in Katherine’s room in San Francisco.

Burning of the Marriage Hat tells a great tale about four generations of women, and is still an adventurous journey, and a murder intrigue that hooks the reader until the end.

Another remarkable characteristic is the mixing of different realities of the ghost, the cowboy, and Wyoming’s landscape into one more character. This seems to belong to a different dimension of reality yet perfectly tied-in and amalgamated in the same whole corpus. Benshoof-Holler, in her book, invites the reader to a journey in both time and space.

The novel is a vast, intimate trip where Katherine profoundly needs to know her story to be able to understand her present and to face the future. The novel describes the process of self-knowledge that the reader can follow in detail, tracking the Ariadne’s thread in the labyrinth of the protagonist’s mind. Katherine is seeking in her past, trying to find out the truth about her grandmother’s death, through all the flashbacks to different moments that cover a whole century in the life of four generations of a family reflecting in the mirror of the turbulent social transformations of the country. During this journey Benshoof-Holler gives a lot of information about the cultural context, and Katherine’s family history, and all of that seems to be alive in the protagonist’s mind and emotions because it has been written in a very natural, spontaneous and intense way.

The protagonist identifies some landmarks in her memory that constitute her personality and helps her to understand herself, like her father leaving the family in a pickup truck when she was four, her relationship with men, the loss and recovery of her daughter, Wyoming and its customs and landscape, her family and the hidden stories, a denial that has lasted four generations.

The Wyoming cowboy is also a presence that threads through the whole book giving another layer to the story. The Italian musical term ‘ostinato’ - a phrase or motif repeated rhythmically over and over - describes the presence of the cowboy very precisely and creates something musical in the structure of this novel."

Benshoof-Holler depicts a learning experience, moral questionings, the reviewing of the past and the analysis of the present, mysteries, discoveries, threats, searches, ghosts, lies and truths, and the hunger to learn and understand. All these elements coexist in Burning or the Marriage Hat where the reader inhabits Katherine’s questioning and perceiver's mind. That’s the depth that Benshoof-Holler definitely accomplishes.

One drawback is the ‘Author’s note’ at the beginning of the book which gives information and statistics about Wyoming, its social background and the birthmothers in the United States. Since the novel itself tells about these things, it would be better to read it at the end as supporting information that invites one to re-contextualize the book. Reading the 'Author’s note' at the beginning can give the impression that this is an informative, educational book, which it is without a doubt. But Benshoof-Holler’s first novel is more than that. It is an artistic work of realistic fiction about a human experience. It is better to start reading at the chapter entitled 'Prologue 1996' which is also a powerful hook for the reader.

Burning of the Marriage Hat is a very interesting novel because it shows a lot about the life and distinctiveness of small towns in the United States during the past century. And it is a very profound reflection about a woman’s life, her confrontation with her past, and the final revelation that Katherine considers at the end of the book “….not everything is impossible. Sometimes, though, one has to move on.”

Q: Where can I buy the book?

A: Ask for the book at your favorite Barnes & Noble bookstore. You can also buy the book online here at this secure site or at Barnesandnoble.com or at Amazon.com or at booksense.com (the site for independent bookstores).

Author's bio

Excerpt from Margaret's book Burning of the Marriage Hat.

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Fiction / Women's Issues / Grief and Recovery /
Adoption / Family History / the West /
Trade paperback, 8 1/2 X 5 1/2, 381 pages
ISBN: 0-9714473-2-2
LCC#: 2001095609
$14.95

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