The Desert Sky Before Us by Anne Valente

The Desert Sky Before Us Reviews

• 
  Melissa ♥ Dog/Wolf Lover ♥ Martin

  4.5 Stars
  
  Mel 🖤🐺🐶🐾
• 
  Berit Talks Books

  
  
  Anne Valente Took me along on this road trip of discovery with her descriptive writing. Sisters Billie and Rhiannon set out on a road trip mapped buy their mother who insists they take the trip after her death. Billie has just been released after being incarcerated for the past six years and Rhiannon is still coming to terms with no longer being a racecar driver. Their mother has given them a journal with map coordinates and crude drawings that will lead them on a treasure hunt of sorts. Along the way not only will they find the treasures left behind by their mother, but they will also reveal secrets and become reacquainted with one another.
  
  The writing in this book was so descriptive I felt as though I was right along with the sisters on this road trip through the south west. I have driven on a lot of the same roads that these sisters took and I thought the author did a really good job with bringing this area of the US to the pages. Now I didn’t necessarily know all the dinosaur stuff going on, and I found that very interesting. The beginning of the book was really compelling, I was really intrigued by the sisters and their back stories. I wanted to know why Billie was incarcerated and why Rhiannon no longer drove race cars. As the book progressed I began to care less. I really had a hard time relating to both of these girls, I could not understand their motivations and if I’m being honest they both seemed a bit self-serving. This is what makes this hard for me to review... On one hand I really liked the concept of the book and the descriptive writing. On the other hand I just found these characters a bit hard to like. Generally I can like or even love a book with characters I don’t like. But in this type of book I think I really needed to feel more of a connection to the characters in order to truly love the book. The sisters did get to know each other better throughout the story and I think they really began to repair their relationship, however I didn’t see much in the way of personal growth. Having said this I think this might be a case of this not being the right book for me, I think some people will really relate to these characters and for them this will be an incredibly special book! 7/10
  
  *** Big thanks to William Morrow for my copy of this book ***
• 
  DJ Sakata

  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!
• 
  Renee Godding

  4.5/5 stars
• 
  Lisa Roberts

  I loved everything about this book. It checked all my boxes. A scavenger hunt set by a mom before she died, sends two sisters, one just out of prison for setting fire to a library who is also a hawk trainer, the other a former NASCAR racer, on a search given only coordinates.
  
  Dead mom was a renowned paleontologist. All three women have different enough careers and backgrounds to make just this little part of the book interesting. They drive from Illinois to Utah to scatter their moms nonexistent ashes and are taken to some of my favorite places including Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
  
  The chapters are interspersed with passages from texts relating to their location and not only is the full bibliographic citation given, but the library call number is given; as a librarian I loved this.
  
  The sisters are for the most part unsure of the reasons for the scavenger hunt and even after several finds and stops, they still are unsure of why their mom has sent them on this scavenger hunt. What they find still doesn't make much sense. We, the reader, is along for the long car ride across the county. They find campgrounds instead of always staying in hotels and as a camper, I liked this part too. I wish they would have explored the campgrounds a bit more though. Nature seemed to be missing from their experience.
  
  I was disappointed in their food choice in Albuquerque - they went to a Vietnamese restaurant. What? No green chile? The author could have done some more research and at least sent them to The Frontier Restaurant on Central. The food choices all along the way were disappointing. They ate at Taco Bell and Denny's. Ugh I did enjoy that they were getting road tripper food at gas stations though.
  
  This is really an exploration into who these main characters are, were and will become. Fantastic!
• 
  LynnDee (LynnDee's Library)

  Ooh boy. This book tried to do too much and did it dully. Is this a commentary on grief? Or is this a commentary on climate change? You can have both narratives in the same story but make it interesting. For being adult women the characters displayed a lot of teen angst and were really one-note and boring. The whole plane-crash-due-to-climate-change was unnecessary. The way it was tied to the grief storyline was flimsy at best and lazy at worst. And as someone who curses like a sailor, I found the "f" word to be used a little gratuitously. Maybe because I didn't get a personality from either of the main characters, the use of the "f" word just did not seem to fit.
  
  Anyway, this is not a bad book in terms of being offensive or problematic (IMO). But it was definitely not the book for me.
• 
  Suzan Jackson

  Two sisters set off on a road trip cross-country, following GPS coordinates their mother left for them before she died. This thoughtful novel delves into family relationships and healing but is also made interesting by its focus on nature, science, and travel. Now I want to hit the road! Read my full review and listen to a sample of the audio book (which I enjoyed):
  
  
  https://bookbybook.blogspot.com/2019/...
• 
  Kathy Stinson

  Interesting enough premise and two Interesting sisters on a journey following the death of their mother. But I was ready for the journey to be over long before the book ended and found needless repetition and the clever use of nouns as verbs so tiresome by the end I almost bumped my rating down to 2. Won’t bother looking for Valente’s other novel.
• 
  Carolyn

  A very well written literary novel, The Desert Sky Above Us, is a step up from my usual mystery/thriller. On the surface it's the story of a road trip taken by two sisters after their mother's death. As the sisters drive across the country, following clues left by their archaeologist mother, they begin to really talk to each other for the first time in years, unraveling, thread by thread, secret hurts and long held misunderstandings. Beautiful detailed descriptions of scenes along the way made me almost believe I was taking the long ride along with them. The only quibble I have with this novel is the climate change warning theme woven throughout was sometimes a little heavy-handed.
• 
  Jen

  I loved everything about this book. I was captured and all in on the very first page. The top level story, a scavenger hunt set up by mom for her daughters to take after the youngest daughter is released from prison. On this level the story is interesting and enough to keep you engaged. The many protags (Billie and Rhiannon) are fully formed, Billie seems more so, but they are both complicated and struggling with who they are and what they want to do with their lives.
  
  But underneath the story are ruminations on grief, on familial relationships, careers and it's certainly shot through with the ideas of climate change, but I felt like the writing let the reader engage in these ideas as much or as little and you want. At least I did not feel hit over the head with these concepts, and throughout my reading I found myself threading in and out depending on my mood at the time.
  
  There was one section, about 3/4 of the way through the scavenger hunt where I thought the narrative started to drag just a bit, but it picks back up, and the last 100 pages are the culmination of all of the choices in the protag's lives. The book ends with a lot of open questions, but it somehow feels resolved. I'll be looking to read more of Valente. I picked this book up on a lark, and I'm so glad it came to me.
• 
  Kim Bakos

  I know that everyone has taken a vacation or road trip where you are enjoying yourself, like the company you are with, are seeing cool sights, have the perfect playlist going, but still can't wait to be done and go home, too. That's this book in a nutshell.
  Two sisters go on a cross-country scavenger hunt on the way to a memorial service for their mother who recently passed away. They see cool places that were important to their mother and pick up mementos that she left for them. Of course, with nothing else to do, they spend time talking and reconnecting. That's pretty much it.
  I enjoyed reading about the various places that they visited, and as any good book should, it sparked enough interest in me to look up some of the places and learn more about them. I'd give the story itself two stars, but because I learned something and sought out more information, I bumped it up to three stars.
• 
  Jamie

  Rhiannon picks up her sister Billie from prison and together they embark on a cross-country scavenger hunt as part of their mother's last wishes before her death.
  
  I love road trips and this book seriously ignited my wanderlust. I was drawn to the premise of this book for that reason and the idea of a scavenger hunt/geocaching expedition. Like a long road trip though, at times it felt a little too long and slow to make real progress. The logic of some decisions and implications didn't always add up for me. I appreciated that the sisters had a lot to unpack mentally and emotionally given their histories, and this road trip was the perfect opportunity. The conversation swung quite a bit and with the back and forth bickering some scenes felt chaotic, but I think that's also true to life, and it worked well juxtaposed with the subplot of the environmental disaster phenomenon. I had mixed feelings about this book but liked it overall.
  
  Rating: 3.5
• 
  Jolissa Skow

  I think a good word to describe this book is “unusual” – in a good way!
  
  There were a couple things that made this book unusual:
  
  The writing style. Valente chose not to use quotation marks at all, making the book have a certain flow to it that’s fast – like Rhiannon’s racing career.
  
  The main characters. Both of the sisters are not your run-of-the-mill female characters. Billie has half of her head shaved and has just come from prison, and Rhiannon is a lesbian racecar driver (one of the only ones in history). Their mother, the famous paleontologist, was also one of the only females in a male-dominated field.
  
  How many other times have you read about cross-country geocaching road trips?
  
  For the full review, visit
  http://www.literaryquicksand.com/2019...
• 
  Sandy

  I had a really difficult time rating this book. The story takes one on a scavenger hunt created by the two main characters Mother before she died. There were times during my reading that I could not put the book down as the story took the sisters across the western states of the USA discovering their mothers' life and work and also having the sisters reflect on their own lives, wrong turns and recovery.
  
  I struggled some with the comparison of the demise of the dinosaurs and the current debate on climate change. The shared memories between Rhiannon and Billie as they followed the coordinates left in a journal by their mother kept me reading the book.
  
  
• 
  Sammie

  This book had my attention in the beginning, but it lost me near the middle. It became very repetitive making it difficult to continue reading. The ending almost seemed rushed and left me feeling like there should have been more of a closing. I also felt there was limited character development and honestly, the sisters are in their 30's but act like teenagers. I think it may also be preference or just different writing style, but I was not a fan of how the author chose to write the dialogue. It was difficult in parts to decipher if someone was talking or if it was narration. I gave it 3 stars because there were a few exciting bits, but overall it was rather anti-climactic.
• 
  Franco Romero

  This book is gorgeously written and full of characters that are fully explored. Toward the end of the novel is a passage in which the sisters (who I felt like I traveled across the country alongside) have a deeply true and resonant conversation. Reading that passage gave me the courage I needed to make a positive change in my life. And that, in turn, helped me remember why contemporary literature is so important. I'm deeply indebted to this novel and I've recommended it to many people. It's worth buying , supporting. I hope you read it.
• 
  Anne Brown

  This book started out strong for me but got very tiresome along the way. More than once I wondered why I was still reading it and I skimmed the last 100 pages just to finish it. The ending was okay but I found the characters rather unlikable although I understood Billie more than Rhiannon. The writing got old for me - way too much description for nothing. Not sure how it's gotten such high ratings but don't think I'll both reading her other novel.
• 
  Gwyn Valverde

  This book explored the relationship between sisters and their rediscovery of themselves as they take a journey in memory of their mother. If you are looking for a book that tidies up all loose ends, this isn't it. This one leaves some "results" up to the imagination. I am not a fan of the eliminated quotation marks that make it harder to know what character is talking. The subplot regarding mass plane crashes seemed like an afterthought. It was a slow-paced read. Not my favorite but ok.
• 
  Lauryn

  I remember finding this book randomly in the used section of Harvard Bookstore and being stoked about a desert road trip that two sisters take. I don't think I anticipated just how hard it would hit me. Valente's writing style is just enough to kind of keep me on my toes the entire time, it was so interesting. I really love Rhiannon and Billie and this journey. It also confirms for me that the desert will always be in my heart, will always be home, even if I don't live there.
• 
  Jen Bickford

  2.75
  
  I really liked elements of this book the sister relationship, travelling across the US and exploring unusual hobbies but...
  
  The story felt a bit aimless- the subplot never came to anything and the conclusion to the main plot was lukewarm at best.
  
  It’s not a bad book by any means- just not particularly memorable. I wouldn’t recommend rushing to read this but it’s also not terrible if it does sound like a concept you would like.
• 
  Staci Marie

  Now I want to escape the big city and go on a road trip out west and camp under a sky filled with constellations and see the milky way.
  The only part I wished was different was about the dad not seeing Jessie for 6 years. The explanation offered seemed really strange.
• 
  Saanvi

  This was a very enjoyable read and I like reading about Billie and Rhiannon and their interactions seemed very realistic. The road trip was also cool and I liked the low-key mystery vibes. I don't have much to say about it but I really enjoyed reading it.
• 
  Chris

  2.5 Two sisters (one just out of prison) take a road trip following their dead mother's scavenger hunt-like clues from IL to NM. Lots of dinos , lots of talking, and lots of getting on each other's nerves. I only liked one of the sisters....
• 
  Elizabeth Rund

  Beautifully written and aching of realness. This book spans so many topics, love, loss, sisterhood, identy, what it means to be something, and so much more. I loved it.
• 
  Marisa

  I’m gonna need to stop weeping before I write a review.
• 
  April

  Not my usual reading material but this was an excellent story, combining family tragedy, road trip, paleontology and climate change.