Leaning on Air

BOOKTRIB—

LEANING ON AIR is Cheryl Grey Bostrom’s second novel, an exquisitely nuanced love story told with gorgeous prose and salt-of-the-earth characters as well-meaning and reassuringly imperfect as the people you know. Equally gorgeous is the story’s setting on a remote family farm in the Palouse, a gently hilled region of southeast Washington state around the Snake River, with fertile soil that grows the world’s best wheat. A hand-drawn map of the fictional Steffen farm, offered on the book’s first page, draws us right into its bucolic setting where nature in all its beauty and power both deepens and drives the action and the story.

A Second Chance at Love
The two main characters — ornithologist Celia Burke and veterinary surgeon Burnaby Hayes — alternate in telling the story. The novel opens in 1997 when Burnaby is driving his motorcycle in northwest Washington and happens to find Celia sprawled out on a dirt road. She’s fallen while sprinting to save a baby goose from a predative raptor circling overhead. The two last saw each other as teenagers 12 years earlier. Despite some awkwardness in their reunion — like when Burnaby notes that his five letters to Celia, the last in 1989, have all gone unanswered — their relationship soon evolves into an intimacy that evidences the depth of Burn’s commitment to Celia and her honest love for this autistic man just the way he is. She’s dated others in the years they’ve been apart, but he has not. “None of those girls were you, Celia.” The physical and emotional attraction between the two plunges them into a commitment that thrills them both.

Fast forward to 2008 where the two have enjoyed a harmonious decade together in southeastern Washington. But then a tragic accident leads to Celia’s painful certainty that autistic Burnaby will never understand and forgive her choices that led to the tragedy. At a time when she craves physical touch and words of comfort, his inability to provide either one feeds her yearning to start afresh, leaving Burn heartbroken.

Reflective, Heartwarming Novel
Circumstances bring her to the Steffen farm as newly widowed Hazel Steffen readies the latest harvest, with the help of farm manager Satchel Milk and his workers and family. From the first day Celia feels healing as she notes the strong connection between land and townsfolk. “Farmsteads and families seemed to belong, anchored to the land and with an unspoken — even nosy — accountability to each other.” She ends up assisting the harvest and a flirtatious neighbor seems an early and easy antidote to her pain.

But the farm is soon beset with mysterious events — cryptic sketches, unexplained catastrophes, a mute little boy. All suggest sabotage, but who could possibly be the culprit? And alongside the unfolding mysteries, Burnaby is a frequent and helpful visitor, sometimes heroic when urgent action is needed, making Celia uncertain as to what their future should be. Unexpected twists of plot and life-threatening moments for all make for a compelling resolution.

Filled With Wonder and Beauty
The raw beauty and power of the Palouse as setting cannot be understated, and Bostrom’s descriptions are stunning to read. And Celia is particularly taken with its birds, allowing us to see them with her trained ornithologic eye.
“And in every direction birds. Passerines — mostly songbirds — flitted and hid. A falcon roved overhead, hunting breakfast. Quail called from chokeberry and hawthorn in the willows and cottonwoods, their whoops and chatter like the nearby creek that ruffled then pooled clear .… Wonder. Variety. Vitality that Celia would drink if she could. All of it canted toward the creek and its downhill chase to the mighty Snake in an uninterrupted chain of life that entered her mind and swept her clean.”

Wonder also comes from Satchel’s five-year-old twin son Cobb Milk in his occasional point-of-view chapters. Autistic just like Burn, Cobb offers a touching view into his beautiful soul when he talks about Hazel Steffens and Celia. “Miz Steffen’s singed when she fixed dinner and I feeled Miz Steffen’s singing inside me and so when Miz Celia comed I gived her flowers with the singing in them.”

Leaning On Air is a gem in and of itself but also a sequel to Bostrom’s multi-award-winning debut novel Sugar Birds, a book you will be dying to read after putting this one down. Nonetheless, this second novel stands on its own, a poignant and authentic characterization of the power of love and of the land, and the capacity each has for restoration.

WASHINGTON STATE MAGAZINE—
Leaning on Air

Twelve years have passed since Celia has seen Burnaby. She immediately notes how much the quiet, bone-hunting boy has changed. He has his doctorate now, along with a more refined set of social skills, and is about to start his career as a professor of veterinary medicine at Washington State University. She has her doctorate, too. Her specialty: birds.

Celia agrees to road-trip with Burnaby from rural Whatcom County, where they met as teens in 1985 in Cheryl Grey (Hobson) Bostrom’s 2021 debut novel Sugar Birds, to WSU and the rolling hills of the Palouse. Most of the story takes place in this landscape, and Bostrom’s lyrical descriptions of it will resonate with those familiar with Pullman and its environs. It might even make them nostalgic for it.

Her poetic prose is chock-full of Evergreen State imagery and references⁠—bald eagles, Nanaimo bars, the salty seaweed scent of the sound, Anthony’s at Squalicum Harbor, Spokane’s Riverfront Park, the Snake River, a pocket of unspoiled Palouse prairie. Palouse prairie restoration is a sub-theme in this compelling sequel, which solidly stands on its own merit.

Leaning on Air is told from multiple perspectives⁠—mostly those of Celia and Burnaby. His little sister, Agate or “Aggie,” a wildlife photographer, makes a brief but important appearance in this volume, too.

Leaning on Air is a captivating story of spirituality and science, wind and wildfire, hardship and harvest, and the meaning of marriage. At its heart, it’s a love story. Expect exquisite writing, romance, mystery, tragedy, healing, and threads of Christian contemplation.

Bostrom plays with time, too, opening her story in 1997, then skipping ahead to 2008, when Celia is 39 and a professor at the University of Idaho. In between, readers encounter the pain of three generations of women, family secrets, loss, and, most of all, hope.

In Leaning on Air, author Cheryl Grey Bostrom continues the stories of Celia Burke and Burnaby Hayes, who were introduced in her debut award-winning novel, Sugar Birds.

It’s 1997, 12 years after Celia and Burnaby’s last encounter. Celia, working as an ornithologist, injures herself along a country road in Northwest Washington state. When Burnaby unexpectedly stops to help her, Celia doesn’t recognize him at first. When she does, she’s surprised at his seeming transformation. Assuming from her past encounters with him that Burnaby is on the autism spectrum, Celia asks him if he is cured and how he changed. Burnaby explains that he has no desire to be cured and that, with the help of a good friend and a transforming relationship with his Maker, he learned to cope with the pressures of societal expectations so challenging for a person on the autism spectrum.

As Celia and Burnaby gradually share their life and career stories—Burnaby is now a veterinary surgeon—they realize that, though they are very different from each other, they are willing to learn how to love each other. Though Celia craves physical touch and Burnaby is repelled by it, they find a way forward and marry.

Ten years later, 39-year-old Celia is pregnant after having two miscarriages. When a hike to a red-tailed hawk's nest she’s been researching leads to tragedy, Celia blames herself and is convinced that Burnaby does the same. Guilt and anger, as well as the death of a person she’s been negatively affected by, lead Celia into a new relationship and a surprising safe haven in Washington’s Palouse region. But at what cost? Can her marriage to Burnaby survive? Since it involves so many challenges and takes so much emotional energy, does she even want it to?

When Burnaby follows Celia to her safe haven, the two find in the community they encounter an “entanglement” that Burnaby is sure is a gift from the Maker whom he and others who live there worship. Celia, wounded by past relationships, initially resists capitulation to Burnaby’s God, convinced that surrender is “dangerous to survival.”

When the community experiences suspicious events, dangerous happenings, and numerous accidents, Celia’s struggles are exacerbated. But a mute boy, an injured red-tailed hawk, and a wild prairie, destroyed by fire, then rejuvenated, birth hope in Celia—hope for her marriage and family, and an understanding, as Burnaby tells her, that God “is for us.”

In this novel for adults, author Cheryl Grey Bostrom masterfully employs avian metaphors and skillfully weaves biblical themes of redemption, grace, and creation renewal throughout the narrative. Leaning on Air—a must read!—is by turns achingly painful and powerfully joyful as Grey Bostrom paints a compelling portrait of the beauty and challenges of Celia and Burnaby’s unique romance and marriage, and subtly points to the Maker and sustainer of all things, Jesus Christ (Heb. 1:3). (Tyndale House Publishers)