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Two Harbors (Harvest Original) | 
| Author: Kate Benson
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 1203937
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 312
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0156031248
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780156031240
ASIN: 0156031248
Publication Date: October 3, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: PAPERBACK. Normal wear. Normal wear. MULLIGANS LIBRARY 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed - Books Shipped Out Within 1 business day
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Those who live in the isolated port town of Two Harbors, Minnesota, still remember the strange downfall of Lila Maywood-a striking beauty who abandoned her family for Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star. Lila's disappearance has defined the life of her daughter, Casey, left with only an autographed, heart-shaped headshot of her mother. When a big-city stranger shows up in town, Casey reluctantly falls for him, only to have him desert her, too. This new abandonment brings Casey face-to-face with the legacy of her mother's past, and the possibility that her own future could follow the same course. Against her father's counsel, Casey journeys from Two Harbors to Hollywood, where she discovers a world of secret lives and shifting roles that holds revealing truths about those who left her behind.
Cinematic and suspenseful, this is the electrifying story of a daughter learning the one act her mother never mastered: letting go.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Dead on view of a small town February 10, 2008
Christine Shaffer (Fargo ND)
I found this book by accident, and was so engrossed with it I read it all in one day. What caught my eye first was the title, because I grew up in the REAL Two Harbors MN. I would love to know how Kate Benson got to know the town so well, because it is a dead-on take on what life is like in that town. After I got over the initial shock and pleasure of the descriptions of life in Two Harbors, I couldn't get away form the mesmerizing story of a young woman who is living under the burdensome shadow of her infamous mother. The twists and turns in the plotline are creative and compelling. Great book, hope to see more from the author.
 Characters, setting distant and nondescript March 2, 2006
Julia_MI (Michigan's Upper Peninsula)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This booked evoked a huge 'eyeroll' for me...cliche, predictable, void of essential character that really lets the reader connect with a piece. I picked up this novel because of its setting initially - as a native of the small-town climate of the northern midwest, it's easy to sense that Benson could have done a better job of establishing not only the social but physical climate of this area. The characters were also void of any real opportunity for the reader to connect with who they are and what makes them unique -- a nebulous, fairly crafted yet very predictable tale existed without the grounding of a well-described setting and characters -- guess that keeps the expectations broad for when the film version comes out.
Multifaceted goodness. January 5, 2006
Katherine L. Morrill
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
This novel is an engrossing read, but by that I do not mean that it is merely an easy read. Kate Benson manages to draw us into an engaging plot with fascinating characters while at the same time she carefully instills her language with meaning and beauty. Close attention to the words on the page rewards readers with layers of significance and subtleties of theme. Benson also developes a real but picturesque sense of place as we follow her emotionally stilted main character from her small hometown in Minnesota to the strange otherworld of LA. The plot has a few noire-like twists and turns that may only be fully appreciated with a second read, but the first time around keeps you turning the page to find out more. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It is well worth your time and attention.
Lyrical, powerful, and moving -- a conversation-starter November 1, 2005
Troy Conner (Naples, FL)
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
In a 1934 article for Esquire, Ernest Hemingway wrote: "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ectasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
Judged by Hemingway's criteria, Kate Benson is already every bit a real writer. In her debut novel Two Harbors, Benson enacts all of the qualities of great narrative fiction listed above. For example, while developing the complex character of her lead, nineteen-year-old Casey Maywood, and her quest to locate the mother who abandoned her for Hollywood, Benson creates epic characters out of both the North Shore and West Coast. Her descriptions of these places and the men and women who populate them are often piercingly lyrical, powerful, and stirring. Even more satisfying are the many scenes and conversations that become meaningful on both surface and subsurface levels. Page after page, there always seems to be much more going on thematically than at first seems evident. Again, like any great writer, Benson's prose rewards close, ambitious reading.
Ultimately, this missing person mystery becomes the kind of story that starts conversations rather than making thoughtful discussion irrelevant due to superficial or formulaic resolution. In the end, because of Benson's stunning skill as a writer, we understand and appreciate with genuine depth "the people and the places and how the weather was."
I have no doubt that this book marks the beginning of a brilliant career. Let us rejoice.
Not compelling October 24, 2005
Michael Nordskog (Minneapolis, MN United States)
10 out of 23 found this review helpful
The words Dex and Stone do not appear together anywhere in the first 100 pages of Kate Benson's recent first novel Two Harbors. I had noticed the name of the protagonist's lover in a synopsis, and it's one of those details that can really prejudice a reader, so I proceeded with caution.
Dex populates Benson's fictional Minnesota port town of Two Harbors, a place not aspiring to authenticity aside from the frigid lake beyond. And her novel is not about the handsome interloper, but the lover he leaves behind, a beautiful and precocious local fledgling named Casey who wears the hairshirt of her mother's pageant-queen, footlights, cuckoo legacy. Kate Benson loves adjectives even more than I love a gaudy mixed metaphor, decorating her early paragraphs with "balloons in bubbly bursts" and "wispy blue streamers." (Quoth the maven: avoid describing nouns that imply the description.) Early on, I sensed that this novel takes place in the near future on a soundstage somewhere in Van Nuys, hopefully with a face like a young Cate Blanchett's in the lead role, and a navel to match; that would at least make the many closeups interesting.
After those first 100 pages, however, Benson stashes the dollhouse and grinds out some compelling passages. The mother-as-refugee-to-Hollywood motif creates a big pit of longing around which this story plausibly orbits. Benson has the patience to tease out the essense of her improbable heroine and tend the garden of dysfunction from which she sprouted. Casey pursues a passion for cinema far from the cultural hearth--did somebody mention Ed Chigliak?--and Benson frequently embeds a cinematic sensibility in her prose. Of course, this conceit tends to read like screenplay, mostly to its detriment. I suppose Two Harbors is an ideal counter-point to Hollywood, and its name serves up a handy metaphor.
There are writers, and there are doers, and Benson is still a writer. Perhaps she'll seize the opportunity during her nascent adulthood to do some things as well, and distance herself from the too-fecund ivy of the writers' academy and her fickle relationship with place, time, and scene. (Indeed, you can detect this transition taking place during the course of her creation of this novel.) The world is bones and rock, first breaths and last, not just post-adolescent circumspection behind hanging drapes of gauzy tulle. For this reader, Benson's Dex Stone, heavy petting, and streams of psycho-hygiene were seldom engaging. Unless you've recently canceled a subscription to Seventeen, this read probably won't thrill you either.
(Incidentally, "Two Harbors" is also the title of a recent indie movie set in the Agate City directed by Minneapolitan James Vculek. I was trying to track the film down when I stumbled upon Benson's novel, which at one point describes a fictional movie with the same title.)
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