You Should Read THREE KEYS by Laura Pritchett
Reading Notes
Today is a perfect Colorado March day: seventies, sunny, and still only halfway through my spring break. It’s 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 Blue on my syllabus for nearly a decade.
A quote from my Honors English 10 syllabus
It’s fitting, then, for me to anchor a review of her latest novel, Three Keys, 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.”
Three Keys covers many topics—relationships, grief, 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 died unexpectedly, her grief was compounded by guilt that, unbeknownst to him, she was planning to divorce him. Her adult son isn’t speaking to her and her relationship with her sister is strained. Utterly lost, Ammalie hatches a plan 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.
She 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 internal traits and physical symptoms allow her a semblance of dialogue that propels the story. She 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 Ammalie 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.”
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, the weather report—and feel as hopeless as Ammalie felt 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. Ammalie’s actions, as well as her later conversation about “the conundrum of eco-grief,” felt like a nod from a stranger passing me on the street. I appreciate the care with which Pritchett crafted a small yet powerful act of resistance for Ammalie.
This is NOT the beach Ammalie visits, but I went to Santa Barbara recently, and it’s the best I’ve got.
By the time she departs the desert, she’s re-opened herself to others and admitted that she needs help. Her final location, a beach, tests her newfound strength, but 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.”
Pritchett’s descriptions of place sing, no doubt, because of her current position as the Director of the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Whether you want to find inspiration in nature or in Ammalie’s questionable decisions, you should read Three Keys.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 2024
Narrator: very close 3rd POV of Ammalie
Setting: Colorado, New Mexico, and New Zealand
Timeline: 3 months
Pairs Well With: Camping trips, anything by Kent Haruf, The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan, paintings by Georgia O’Keefe
Book Club
Of the three places Ammalie visits—the mountains, the desert, or the beach—which would you choose? Why is that place meaningful to you?
In addition to connecting with the varying landscapes, Ammalie also respects animals. She adopts a dog named Lady, shares a moment with a deer, and learns about birding. What animal do you feel a connection with? What does it mean to you?
Close Reading
At her final location, Ammalie sneaks into a community center:
“Then she cleaned all the windows at the community center with newspaper and vinegar in a spray bottle she’d found under the kitchen sink. Because it was still dark, she couldn’t see the streak marks, but surely the windows would be cleaner. Surely her efforts would help someone, someday, have a clear view.”
In her first location, Ammalie hides in a closet when a housekeeper enters. She’s so unsure of herself that can’t reveal herself, even when realizes it is another woman and not the homeowner. The scene in the community center reverses this earlier moment. Instead of hiding and closing into herself, Ammalie is able to look past her own troubles to consider the needs of others. Cleaning the windows is not a world-changing action, but it’s the intention that’s important here. Ammalie is finally thinking about those around her in an inclusive way, rather than avoiding them. By pairing these moments, Pritchett is showing us how much Ammalie has grown.
Creative Writing
Nonfiction: Ammalie believes in reading tourism: “That’s the least tourists could do, she thought—read one novel set in the state they were visiting” (125). Try reading a novel, short story, essay, or memoir set in a place you’ve recently visited (bonus points if it was written by an author from that place). Then, write about your reflections. What new insights did you gain? What new questions do you have?
Fiction: Imagine a character who has planned the perfect getaway weekend. Maybe this person has a stressful job and needs to shut the world out for a bit—or perhaps this person works a brain-rotting job and needs to explore. Whatever their needs, this trip is just right for them, and they’ve booked an apartment for the weekend/week/month. Except…when they show up, the rental is occupied! Who’s there? How does everyone react?
Sentence Study
Perhaps this is cheating, but I’m going with the first sentence here:
“How quickly she’d become animal.”
Disclaimer: This is not a sentence! Instead, it’s a delicious intentional fragment. How is an adverb. When used at the beginning of a question, it’s an interrogative adverb, but in this case, Pritchett uses it as a relative adverb to introduce a dependent clause, to the following effect:
Starting mid-thought catches our attention and zooms us immediately into the narrator’s head.
This arrangement places emphasis on animal because it is the final word. Right away, we know that our narrator is not feeling like herself.
To consider the impact of Pritchett’s choice, compare her original fragment (as written) to a revised sentence:
The “revised” simple sentence is so BLAH. By ending with quickly, it’s prioritizing the speed of her descent, rather than the outcome of her descent, which is “animal” and (later) “feral.” I’m much more interested in how she’s feeling than in how long it took her to feel that way!
Another noteworthy item here is that Pritchett uses animal as an adjective. Usually it’s a noun, but by omitting the article an, she turns the word into a predicate adjective. I love this effect because it’s a fresh take on the word, and it is also just that bit more concise.
