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in a barren landscape

First-time novelist Amy Shearn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., but her bio says she was educated, in part, in New Mexico — and she’s clearly spent some time in West Texas, as well.
She establishes her Southwest credentials with the opening sentences of her exceptional debut, “How Far Is the Ocean From Here”: “Along the highway in that stretch of desert, somewhere between West Texas and East New Mexico, there was nothing and nothing and then the Thunder Lodge. But what a nothing! There the horizon had a weight she hadn’t known a horizon could have: a plain unvaried by cactus or tree, unstirred by lizard or coyote, undimpled by even a shadow, only here and there the slightest swell of hills … the desert lay insensible to any human who entered it.”
Shearn’s intimate, poised grasp of the landscape also extends to her human characters, particularly narrator Susannah Prue, a young surrogate mother from Chicago who hunkers down at the Thunder Lodge when she flees the inevitable hand-over of her baby to its parents.
Although the baby boy she’s carrying isn’t hers, biologically, Susannah has become so attached she’s not sure she can give him up. She heads south and west, vaguely interested in seeing the ocean, but the farthest she gets is the “grotto” (dingy swimming pool) at the Thunder Lodge, “a godforsaken fleabag motel in the middle of truly-not-exaggerating nowhere.”
Once Susannah is ensconced, lazily waiting out the final days of her pregnancy (with no hospital in sight for at least 50 miles), Shearn gets quickly to the real theme of the book: the amazing resilience of humans in finding “family,” even if nature hasn’t provided it.
Susannah becomes attached to both Tim, the motel owners’ slightly retarded teenage son, and Frankie, an extremely conflicted 7-year-old girl who passes through with her aunt, Dicey, as Dicey takes the girl to live with her father out West.
We also learn about Julian and Kit, the parents of the baby Susannah’s carrying, who are also yearning for family. Julian, an adoptee, can’t wait to meet his son, the first blood relative he’ll know. The supercontrolling Kit wants a child but isn’t sure about the mess involved.
Shearn’s shifting points of view are a bit tricky. The book is told mostly through Susannah’s eyes, but every now and then we’re suddenly in Frankie’s head or Tim’s or Kit’s for a paragraph or two.
She also has a glorious way with description, conjuring vivid images with brevity and wit, as when she writes that a dying car’s hood “emitted a fine mist like a perturbed skunk.”
This is an author to read now and to definitely watch in the future. She has the potential to be as good as Alice Hoffman or Billie Letts, authors whose fans should put Shearn high on their to-read list.