From the start, Lynn Stegner's The Half-Life of Guilt delivers an ominous feeling. Soon enough, what it's building to is revealed, and it is, in fact, awful, but the awful thing is not the point. In the months and years that follow, the twins Nina and Clair process those few minutes that changed everything.
Like the accumulation of that family history, the present-day narrative tilts and rolls like a slow-moving ship, taking readers into some unknown, inexorable future. Clair, now a botanist, and Mason, a photographer, deal with the intricacies of their ongoing relationship on their way to a remote area in Baja California, Mexico. There, a saltworks expansion is likely to reduce or possibly eliminate the California gray whales that have just recently returned from the edge of extinction. Though the destruction being wrought by unscrupulous actors is real, the heart of this story is not environmentalist polemic. Instead, it's about love--familial and romantic love--and about making yourself vulnerable to another. It's about forgiveness and hope and, of course, guilt.
Stegner's simply stunning writing is full of sentences that sing off the page. This is a thoroughly literary novel, but the revelations keep raising the pulse of the story. In that first moment with the whales, "Clair manages to forget herself," and Clair's moment of forgetting marks a shift that will inform every moment to follow, including her relationship with Nina, who figures in all of Clair's past and hides inside every hope she might have for the future. Stegner knows the powerful bond between sisters, and The Half-Life of Guilt is a powerful story, beautifully told. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian