Justine Champine
Justine Champine’s short fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Epoch, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and is a founding member of No Tokens Journal. Knife River is her first novel.
Knife River
Justine Champine
When Jess was thirteen her mother went for a walk and never returned. Jess and her older sister Liz never found out what happened. Instead, they did what they hoped their mother would do: survive. As soon as she was old enough, Jess fled their small town of Knife River, wandering from girlfriend to girlfriend like a ghost in her own life, aimless in her attempts to outrun grief and confusion. But one morning fifteen years later she gets the call she’s been bracing herself for: Her mother's remains have been found.
Needle Lake
Justine Champine
Two cousins on very different sides of adolescent girlhood spend one winter together that changes both of their lives forever.And once, after Elna came to stay, I watched a man drown there on Christmas Eve, his body trapped and twitching beneath the ice.Thirteen-year-old Ida was born with a hole in her heart. Forbidden from most physical activities and considered strange by her teachers and peers, she prefers spending time alone, memorizing countries and capitals on her globe and imagining the world outside the tiny logging town of Mineral, Washington.One afternoon, in walks her cousin Elna, here to stay for a few weeks. Ida hasn't seen Elna since they were young, and she's immediately drawn to her older cousin, who's everything Ida is mature, self-assured, charismatic, and daring. Elna lives in San Francisco, a city Ida's only seen as a dot on her globe. She doesn’t treat Ida like she’s a fragile kid whose heart might give out at any moment. She isn’t scared off by Ida’s tendency towards rigidity and fixation. Ida is enraptured.Then, on Christmas Eve, a man dies out in the woods near Mineral, and the two cousins suddenly share a secret beyond the scope of anything Ida has dealt with before. Fear begins to mix in with the reverence Ida feels towards her cousin, especially when she discovers Elna is hiding more than she ever suspected. Brimming with lush prose and careful observation, Needle Lake is an arresting portrait of girlhood and the overwhelming, sometimes dangerous intensity of adolescence.
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