“I loved Nicole Helget’s The Turtle Catcher. So many stories cover happy times growing up on a farm in poverty. This
beautifully written story, however, captures the gritty, oppressive life on a farm in hard times. The story follows two families in a German immigrant community in Minnesota during and after World War I. The beginning will blow you away! Best of luck to Nicole on another terrific book!” – Susie Fruncillo, Lake Country Booksellers, White Bear Lake, MN
A stand-out fiction debut by a prize-winning young writer. The Summer of Ordinary Ways, Nicole Helget’s fierce and lyrical memoir of growing up on a Minnesota dairy farm, was a favorite of critics and booksellers and received widespread acclaim. People magazine hailed the young author’s ability to “take the messiest of lives and fashion something beautiful.”
Here in her first novel, Helget turns her extraordinary sensibility to a haunting love story with a heinous crime at its core. In a rural Minnesota town of German immigrants in the tumultuous days of World War I, The Turtle Catcher brings together two misfits from warring clans. Liesel, the one girl in the upstanding family of Richter boys, harbors a secret about her body that thwarts all hope for a normal life. Her closest friend is Lester, the “slow” boy in the raffish Sutter family, a gentle, kind soul who spends his days trapping turtles in the lake. Yearning for human touch in the wake of her parents’ deaths, Liesel turns to her only friend-leading her brother, just returned from the war, to an act that will haunt not only both families but the entire town.
Helget’s novel is a story of loyalty and betrayal that, like her earlier book, proves her uncommon understanding of the natural world and human frailties. Both moving and heartfelt, The Turtle Catcher confirms this young writer’s exceptional talent.
NICOLE HELGET was born in 1976 and grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota, a childhood and place she drew on in the writing of her memoir, The Summer of Ordinary Ways. She received her BA and an MFA in creative writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. She now lives with her family in Mankato, Minnesota. NPR’s Scott Simon awarded The Turtle Catcher the Tamarack Prize from Minnesota Monthly based on the novel’s first chapter.
