You Should Read THREE KEYS by Laura Pritchett
A charming book about loss, hot flashes, and "the conundrum of eco-grief"
Today was a perfect Colorado March day: seventies, sunny, and still only halfway through my spring break.1 It was the kind of weather that begs me to share one of my favorite Colorado authors with you.
Memorable lines abound in Laura Pritchett’s works. Proof: I’ve included a quote from her novel Stars Go Blue2 on my syllabus for nearly a decade.
It’s fitting, then, for me to anchor a review of her latest novel, Three Keys,3 with a quote as well. As one character tells another:
“I suppose that is the conundrum of eco-grief. How do we mourn something that hasn’t happened, but instead is happening. The severity of what happens next is dependent on how we act now. And yet we do almost nothing. Because it’s hard to know what to do. It’s hard to change” (267).
Three Keys covers many topics—relationships, loss, independence, parenting, identity, and hot flashes, to name a few—but Pritchett’s message about “the conundrum of eco-grief” remained with me longest after I read the book.
Ammalie Brinks is a recently widowed, completely floundering woman. After her husband dies unexpectedly, her grief is compounded by the guilt that, unbeknownst to him, she had been planning a divorce. Her adult son isn’t speaking to her, and her relationship with her sister is strained. Utterly lost, Ammalie decides to visit three different places that were meaningful to her late husband.
The catch? She has neither a key nor permission to visit a single one.
Ammalie’s first stop is a mountain house in Colorado, where “aspens [are] white-barked and staring at her with their dark eyes” (22). In this first section, Ammalie does her best to avoid others. Pritchett overcomes the pitfalls of an isolated narrator by giving Ammalie a few quirks.
For instance, Ammalie nicknames both objects and feelings. Her racing heart is Thumper, her sleeping bag is Fluffiest Red, and her anxiety is Sea Creature. Even when she’s alone, Ammalie’s personification of her belongings, traits, and physical symptoms provide a semblance of dialogue propel the story. She also thinks in lists, ranging from survival necessities to life goals to personal mantras. She questions her decisions, providing a play-by-play of her insecurities.
Lest that scare you off, be assured that Pritchett balances Ammalie’s uncertainty with beautiful depictions of the natural world, a world that Ammalie notices more and more as she travels.
Take this description from when she enters the desert:
“Everything in the three other directions was simply endless, endless, endless rolling land, made extra-endless because of its pastel dullness, and extra-extra-endless because of its sparsity, which made the whole landscape appear as if it was barely hanging on to existence as it clung to the sky. This was what was meant by desert. Not the sand dunes kind of desert with camels walking through, but the desert of the American West, the desert of Arizona” (91-2).
Ammalie is both awed and humbled by the landscape, particularly as she reflects on the migrants who cross its unforgiving miles seeking better lives. Before leaving, she undertakes a personal mission of goodwill. I won’t spoil her plan, but I want to call attention to the attitude with which she completes it. She thinks, “Yes, others could do more but she could not, and so that was that. She was . . . a regular person with a goal and one day” (202). I love this moment because Ammalie gains the confidence to value her own effort, even when she’s up against overwhelming global and human tragedy.
There have been so many days lately when I read the news—or shit, even the weather report—and feel as hopeless as Ammalie feels lost in the novel's opening pages. I bought solar panels and an EV, but I can’t buy my kids a safe or happy future. I can’t conjure an inhabitable planet for them. I can’t guarantee them much at all. Reading about Ammalie’s actions, as well as her later conversation about “the conundrum of eco-grief,” felt like receiving a knowing nod from a stranger passing me on the street.
By the time she departs the desert, Ammalie has re-opened herself to others and admitted that she needs help. Her final location, a beach, tests her newfound strength. At least she has a gorgeous backdrop for the struggle ahead:
“In the far distance, between branches, she could see little slivers of the sea, both the band of blue that met the sky in the far distance and the lines of white breakers hitting the shore with such force” (227).
Pritchett’s descriptions of place sing, perhaps influenced by her current position as the Director of the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Whether you find inspiration in nature or in Ammalie’s questionable decisions, you should read Three Keys. (And to find out what book Laura Pritchett thinks you should read, find her recommendation here!)
Speaking of independent women, have you read Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” recently? If not, it’s worth a revisit. Published in 1894, the story is a study in psychological realism. A plot diagram would be disappointing: A woman named Louise learns that her husband has died, so she goes upstairs to feel all the feelings, and then she goes back downstairs to find a surprise. The End.
But turn-of-the-century psychological realists were not hung up on plot! There was no “saving the cat” for Kate Chopin. Instead, she wanted to explore the inner lives of characters, particularly those who lived on the margins. On the outside, the protagonist of the story is well-off, but Chopin’s deep dive into her psyche reveals that a more complicated reality. Let’s just say that Louise Mallard and Ammalie Brinks would be friends.
At about a thousand words, it’s a quick read, but I’ll let you in a little secret: If you use the interrupted reading strategy to teach it to your class, it takes about an hour. And this is a good thing, I swear!!
Interrupted reading (or chunked reading) is a strategy I learned from my first mentor teacher. Instead of giving students the full text, I segment it into slides that we read together. After each slide, I give them about a minute to annotate a question, connection, or reaction. Then I give them another minute to compare notes with a partner. Using this slowed-down strategy prompts students to draw inferences and analyze the text at a deeper level than they likely would if they read alone (or even if we read the entire text together, unchunked).
While you can use it with any story (or text), it’s especially fun with Chopin’s because it’s like we are in the narrator’s head in real time. Grab the FREE lesson here (make a copy of the document).
I was in my ideal state. (That’s a PLC joke. If you know, you know.)
As I shared previously, my stepdad and I read this for our book club. It started out as “classics” and turned into “lots of Russians” for a while, but we read just about anything.
Not to be confused with the Three Keys book in Kelly Yang’s middle grade series, which my daughter assures me is THE BEST.