Leaning on Air by Cheryl Bostrom
What's It About?
They last spoke as teens … but a surprise encounter 12 years later reunites ornithologist Celia Burke with veterinary surgeon Burnaby Hayes, and they plunge into the most unusual romance of her life. When tragedy strikes, Celia begins anew, and she must examine her past ― and reconsider her future.Leaning On Air is Cheryl Grey Bostrom’s second novel, an exquisitely nuanced love story told with gorgeous prose and salt-of-the-earth characters as well-meaning and reassuringly imperfect as the people you know. Equally gorgeous is the story’s setting on a remote family farm in the Palouse, a gently hilled region of southeast Washington state around the Snake River, with fertile soil that grows the world’s best wheat. A hand-drawn map of the fictional Steffen farm, offered on the book’s first page, draws us right into its bucolic setting where nature in all its beauty and power both deepens and drives the action and the story.
A Second Chance at Love
The two main characters — ornithologist Celia Burke and veterinary surgeon Burnaby Hayes — alternate in telling the story. The novel opens in 1997 when Burnaby is driving his motorcycle in northwest Washington and happens to find Celia sprawled out on a dirt road. She’s fallen while sprinting to save a baby goose from a predative raptor circling overhead. The two last saw each other as teenagers 12 years earlier. Despite some awkwardness in their reunion — like when Burnaby notes that his five letters to Celia, the last in 1989, have all gone unanswered — their relationship soon evolves into an intimacy that evidences the depth of Burn’s commitment to Celia and her honest love for this autistic man just the way he is. She’s dated others in the years they’ve been apart, but he has not. “None of those girls were you, Celia.” The physical and emotional attraction between the two plunges them into a commitment that thrills them both.
Fast forward to 2008 where the two have enjoyed a harmonious decade together in southeastern Washington. But then a tragic accident leads to Celia’s painful certainty that autistic Burnaby will never understand and forgive her choices that led to the tragedy. At a time when she craves physical touch and words of comfort, his inability to provide either one feeds her yearning to start afresh, leaving Burn heartbroken.
Reflective, Heartwarming Novel
Circumstances bring her to the Steffen farm as newly widowed Hazel Steffen readies the latest harvest, with the help of farm manager Satchel Milk and his workers and family. From the first day Celia feels healing as she notes the strong connection between land and townsfolk. “Farmsteads and families seemed to belong, anchored to the land and with an unspoken — even nosy — accountability to each other.” She ends up assisting the harvest and a flirtatious neighbor seems an early and easy antidote to her pain.
But the farm is soon beset with mysterious events — cryptic sketches, unexplained catastrophes, a mute little boy. All suggest sabotage, but who could possibly be the culprit? And alongside the unfolding mysteries, Burnaby is a frequent and helpful visitor, sometimes heroic when urgent action is needed, making Celia uncertain as to what their future should be. Unexpected twists of plot and life-threatening moments for all make for a compelling resolution.
Filled With Wonder and Beauty
The raw beauty and power of the Palouse as setting cannot be understated, and Bostrom’s descriptions are stunning to read. And Celia is particularly taken with its birds, allowing us to see them with her trained ornithologic eye.
“And in every direction birds. Passerines — mostly songbirds — flitted and hid. A falcon roved overhead, hunting breakfast. Quail called from chokeberry and hawthorn in the willows and cottonwoods, their whoops and chatter like the nearby creek that ruffled then pooled clear .… Wonder. Variety. Vitality that Celia would drink if she could. All of it canted toward the creek and its downhill chase to the mighty Snake in an uninterrupted chain of life that entered her mind and swept her clean.”
Wonder also comes from Satchel’s five-year-old twin son Cobb Milk in his occasional point-of-view chapters. Autistic just like Burn, Cobb offers a touching view into his beautiful soul when he talks about Hazel Steffens and Celia. “Miz Steffen’s singed when she fixed dinner and I feeled Miz Steffen’s singing inside me and so when Miz Celia comed I gived her flowers with the singing in them.”
Leaning On Air is a gem in and of itself but also a sequel to Bostrom’s multi-award-winning debut novel Sugar Birds, a book you will be dying to read after putting this one down. Nonetheless, this second novel stands on its own, a poignant and authentic characterization of the power of love and of the land, and the capacity each has for restoration.
About Cheryl Grey Bostrom:
Tyndale novelist Cheryl Grey Bostrom, MA, writes surprising prose that reflects her keen interest in nature and human behavior. Her recent books include the international bestseller Sugar Birds — winner of more than a dozen fiction awards — and Leaning on Air, endorsed as “a reader’s dream,” and a “cross-
