The debut novel from local author Rebekah Anderson is an ambitious piece of fiction about the building of Grand Coulee dam and its impact on people and places in the mid 1930s in North Central Washington. It centers around the town of Kettle Rapids (now Kettle Falls) and one family in particular that are impacted by the coming of the dam. It’s unusual to find a good fictional story that is created out of those times and that locale, and Anderson has done a solid job of painting the historical world of the 1930s.
The background to the story is that in the 1920s, the federal government started discussing the notion of building large dams to tap the rivers of the west. These were gigantic concrete monuments to industry and capitalism, bringing the promise of irrigation and electricity to the state. The Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt, who had championed dams earlier in his political career, along with the rising militarism of Japan and Germany, made it a perfect time to push through the building of these dams, with the idea to create jobs during the worse economic downturn in the history of the country.
The book opens in October 1935 with a large cast of characters preparing to attend a tense meeting with the president of the Starks Company, the prime contractor building the dam, who lays out the plan of the government to inundate their homes, farms and even the town itself. He offers jobs and exhorts them to take the government payouts for their properties. The meeting and the impact of those actions is shown as a dramatic tension between neighbors and even inside families along the river. Anderson then narrows the plot to one man and his family as he heads off in search of work at the dam. She goes on to show us the world of the construction of the Grand Coulee, along with other characters who are swept along in the rising tide of strong feelings for the river, and their ways of dealing with these feelings. The book also brings in the impact on the tribes of the area, as their sacred salmon were to be blocked from coming up river from the dam (still an issue of considerable contention) and even their burial grounds which were to be flooded.
Jonathan Evanson, author of West of Here, and Small World, blurbs The Grand Promise with this praise,”…more than a gripping debut from a writer of grand promise. Anderson…has given us a great addition to the northwest canon.”
Anderson’s roots are deep in Washington State. Her family came to the state as a result of the Homestead Act in 1862. In addition to her attending the Port Townsend Writer’s Workshop, she earned her MFA in fiction from New York University, under the mentorship of E.L. Doctorow. The Grand Promise, her first novel, is loosely based on her family history.
She researched the book with the help of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and she relied on a series of historical resources, including excerpts from President Roosevelt’s “Remarks at the Site of the Grand Coulee Dam” in the mid 30s.
If you are looking for a well researched and interesting historical fiction of this little known history of our state, you will enjoy The Grand Promise. Published by Empty Bowl Press (in Chimacum) it is available directly from www.Emptybowl.org or booksellers everywhere.
