Ellen Baker

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sprawled across generations even as it focused on the life of a woman in 1950s America.

Her second novel, I Gave My Heart to Know This, will probably have a similar appeal, despite the fact that Baker's ambitions are even larger. In this book, the reader is led across big jumps in time, from 2000 to 1913, and back again, with long stops in the 1940s. The story is told from several different points of view, as Baker builds the mosaic of tragedy that defines one family's life over a century.

If I Gave My Heart to Know This is shaped by the shared history that impinges on the lives of its characters. A 1913 tragedy--the Italian Hall panic, or massacre, that occurred in Calumet, Michigan when someone maliciously yelled "Fire!" in a hall crowded with the families of striking mine workers, causing seventy-three deaths--creates an attitude in one young man that affects his wife and family for the next century. The novel centers on three women who have been touched by this man and on their work as welders in a Wisconsin, shipyard during World War II. These women assume the war work when the men have either gone off to fight or have disappeared into their own insecurities.

People disappear often in this novel, sometimes forever, sometimes to reappear decades later; but all are bound by one hardscrabble farm way up in northern Wisconsin. They keep being drawn to this place, and some of the characters allow themselves to be defined by it.