We Hope for Better Things

We Hope for Better Things by Erin Bartels    400 pages

As a reader and a writer, I’m always looking for compelling reads that linger long after I’ve turned the last page. Erin Bartels’s debut novel, “We Hope for Better Things,” is such a novel. Bartels startles with her ability to take three separate timelines and weave them into one excellent story.

The story lines cover contemporary times, 1960s Detroit and Civil War-era Detroit outskirts. At the heart of each plot is forbidden love, one of the most that forbidden loves of all times, between whites and blacks. There are also the stories of race relations of each time period that could easily overpower the story, but Bartels uses her skill to not let that happen.

The main protagonist is journalist Elizabeth Balsam, who works for the scandalous rag, the “Free Press.” She is about to break a story that will have major repercussions in Detroit’s political powerhouse. Before that happens, Elizabeth has been contacted by a man who claims to have a box of photos and a camera that belongs to her family. Someone she has never heard of.

Elizabeth, who loves a good story, rather reluctantly agrees to take the camera, and if she can contact the woman named Nora, and if she wants the, she’ll arrange to have the photos returned.

Nora is Elizabeth’s great-aunt on her father’s side. Her sister knows of her as does a cousin, Barb, that is also a stranger. In contacting Barb, now unemployed, Elizabeth has somehow managed to agree to see if old Aunt Nora is still fit to live alone. Elizabeth goes to visit Nora, and there she begins to learn her family history, a history that is foreign to her, and one that she participates in.

Sometimes the timelines between the contemporary story and the 1960s story was a little confusing. Nora is such a major character in those periods that it threw me off a tad when the story switched, although Bartels clearly delineates each section.

 “We Hope for Better Things” is a wonderful read, and it receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.