The purpose of getting away is literally to get away from your life, and hopefully, from your worries and problems that you carry around every day. Unfortunately, those problems can follow you wherever you go, and sometimes, they can even come to a head once you’re away from your daily routine, particularly if you’re with a group of trusted people on whom you can unload your emotional baggage.
Author Kim McCollum explores female friendships and their ability to expose those underlying problems and find ways to resolve them in her women’s fiction novel, What Happens in Montana. Below is my review of the novel along with an interview with McCollum about her book and her writing process.
What Happens in Montana plot summary
Four old friends on the cusp of becoming empty nesters plan a girls’ trip to Bridger Hot Springs, a former dude ranch and hotel turned into a health-centered retreat. Each woman is trying to get away from their problems for awhile, Brooke, a woman who is beginning to notice her strained relationship with her fiancé, and Tracy, a stay-at-home-mom who is beginning to crack under the weight of a long-carried secret.
At the retreat, the women sign up for various sessions with Max, a hiking guide and yoga instructor who takes a liking to Brooke. Watching out for the women is an elderly employee named Maude who, along with her bloodhound, Toby, and Simone, the ghost of a young prostitute who was murdered on the property decades prior.
As the trip progresses, the women embark on dangerous adventures, make questionable choices, and come clean with past and current decisions. This will test their friendships and make them question their future actions.
The story
What Happens in Montana is packed full of the most popular and enticing women’s fiction elements: mystery, female friendships, paranormal activity, and more. Its unfolding plot and tight-knit girl group reminded me a lot of the HBO show Big Little Lies, particularly in the fact that it continuously teases a murder and builds tension while leading up to the big reveals.
The story is well-paced with a solid introduction to each of the characters before they embark on their trip. From there, they bounce from one activity to another without feeling like the story is trying to rush to something more entertaining or drag it out further than it needs to be.
The main conflicts are more about the women’s personal relationships than the mystery or paranormal elements. It is very much a character-driven drama with slices of these other genres thrown in for extra flavor. But I think this gives the story more originality and puts more meat on the plot than it would have otherwise.
The characters
The novel is told from numerous perspectives, including the four friends, Maude, and Simone. I always love this alternative to a third-person omniscient narrator because of how it draws the reader closer to each narrator while still getting to follow multiple perspectives of the unraveling plot.
The four friends are in an older demographic than a lot of the women’s fiction that is out there. This made it a refreshing read, even though, as an older millennial, I couldn’t completely relate to them and their struggles at this point in my life and found them all to be a little cheesy in their interactions and even a bit immature at times.
But I’ve always been drawn to stories about motherhood, and even though these women are taken away from their typical roles, their identities still follow them to Bridger Hot Springs. It’s also nice to have the story populated primarily with female characters without the main focus being on matching them up with a partner.
The most interesting character to me, of course, was the ghost, Simone. Her story adds a historical aspect to the novel as well as a supernatural one that the novel doesn’t really need, but I’m not going to complain about it being there.
Maude is one of those “kind” but not “nice” characters who will insult you as she is saving you. She is much softer with the reader than she is with the characters in the story. So, she is easy to like. Her nosiness is deep enough that the entire story could have been told from her perspective based on the eavesdropping that she does.
Two characters who get a bit shortchanged are two of the women from the girls’ trip group: Krista and Quinn. Krista in particular appears to just be along for the ride, and Quinn becomes an unassuming victim of circumstance. But other than that, it’s Brooke and Tracy’s dramas that take center stage.
The setting
The story turns the tables by taking the friends group out of the more typical travel destination, Las Vegas, and instead sending them off to the Montana wilderness. It doesn’t seem like the kind of place for these four women to let loose. They have to smuggle in booze in sunscreen bottles and seem to want to party more than take yoga classes and hikes in the wilderness.
However, the Montana setting provides an isolated environment for all of its plot elements to play out. The retreat itself is in poor shape, reflecting its less than idyllic history. It also reflects the unsteadiness of life and how it can wear you down over the years.
My recommendation
I recommend What Happens in Montana to readers looking for a multi-perspective women’s fiction read with touches of mystery, paranormal, and history. There’s so much crammed into the story that it’s hard to land every jump, but overall, McCollum is able to create an even mix of diverse plot elements, tones, and characters that will keep you reading on, never taking it too seriously, yet also taking something away from it, particularly how important it is to have a support system, to own your mistakes, and to make amends for the past.
What is your ideal girls’ trip? Leave your answers in the comments below!
My rating
An interview with Kim McCollum
You have a list of references in the back of your book. What part of your research did you begin first? What was the most fun or interesting facts to learn about?
I was fascinated to learn that 18% of Montana’s original homesteaders were single women, often with children. Can you imagine?
Montana’s winters are extremely harsh. Many weeks can be 30 below or more. These women lived in 12×12 homesteads with just mud, straw, and newspaper as insulation. To take care of animals in that weather and survive as a single woman in that climate is beyond comprehension for me.
So, this novel began as a historical fiction based on a famous female homesteader named Maddie Cramer. She was an editor from the east coast, who was leaving a bad marriage and came by the Great Northern Railway to Montana with her eight-year-old son. She wrote for the Great Northern Railway Bulletin and told stories of the fruitful land which didn’t need irrigating. Of course, this was before the draught of 1917 – 1919 which drove many homesteaders back home.
So, I wrote about a woman who came to Montana in 1912 only to lose her farm to a fire a few years later, so she turned to moonshining (as many women did back then) to support herself and her daughter. I had her going to jail and then I got stuck. Writing about someone in jail is initially exciting, but then what? Nothing happens all day, so I lost interest and set that book aside.
Then, I started a novel loosely based on my girlfriends whom I met when our now college-age kids were babies at a Mommy and Me group in Las Vegas. We do reunions every couple of years. and we have a blast. We are the kind of easy friends who don’t have to talk often to know how much we care for each other. And if any of us needs anything, we are there in a heartbeat.
But it all came together when my husband and I were detoured from our usual route to the lake in the summer. We drove past this incredible, hulking, stucco building which seemed majestic but completely out of place in the middle of nowhere Montana.
My husband told me it used to be a famous hot springs retreat that hosted celebrities. Even Theodore Roosevelt stayed there. But the latest owner hadn’t had the money to fix up the largest building so just one small building to the side is fixed up and that is where people can stay.
He added, almost as an afterthought, that it’s dry and haunted. So, of course I had to stay there! It turned out to be the perfect setting for my girlfriend’s reunion and the ghost’s story was influenced by my research about Montana’s single women homesteaders.
How much of the story was plotted out in advance, and how much changed from the idea to the finished product?
I’m a pantser, so I don’t plot much at all. I really think when you take time to develop your characters and really get to know them, they tell you how they want the story to go.
For this novel, with such a lively cast of characters, they each vied for my attention. One day Simone took the reins with her story and then next it was Maude wanting her time in the sun.
I did learn in one of my MFA courses that I needed to write the ending early on in the process because it is important to have a destination in mind, so I did that, but the journey was often dictated by my characters. The setting of the ending changed, but the feeling did not, if that makes sense. I knew how I wanted my characters to feel by the end, but my original idea of how that would be shown changed during the process.
What tips or suggestions do you have for visiting Montana?
That depends on what you like to do! Montana is best experienced outdoors. So, I would suggest hiking, skiing, white water rafting, kayaking, winter sleigh rides, flyfishing, water skiing, Nordic skiing, skijoring (well, at least go and watch), helicopter rides over Yellowstone National Park, snowcat rides through Yellowstone National Park, snowmobiling, hunting, or relaxing and watching the sunset on a cool summer evening.
Montana is absolutely breathtaking no matter the activity. It is worth braving the cold in winter.
What would be your ideal girls’ trip?
When you have the right friends, anywhere is the ideal girls’ trip. Often when I’m with these friends, we stay in our P.J.’s sipping coffee and chatting till noon.
Even though the hot springs retreat in What Happens in Montana is less than ideal, these ladies still manage to have a great time. In fact, the more out-of-your-comfort- zone you are, the better.
I would love to head to Iceland and hike to the waterfalls, go out golfing in Scotland, or sip margaritas on the beach in Mexico. I’m up for anything. But doing nothing with a great group of friends is often the best destination of all.
Have you ever had a paranormal experience?
Maybe? I have to say, despite the book, I’m quite a skeptic when it comes to the paranormal. When I stayed alone at the hot springs retreat in the book, I was most certainly creeped out. In fact, I headed to the bar in town at about 9pm because I couldn’t stand being in that place alone any longer.
Possibly, if I had stayed and not wimped out, I could have had a paranormal experience. Instead, the locals bought me too many drinks (they don’t have many out-of-town visitors), so I was most likely too drunk to notice any paranormal activity by the time I returned to my room.
What do you think makes female friendships such a strong bond compared to other relationships?
Women really do need each other more than men do, it seems. I’m no expert, but my friends and I were talking about this just the other day.
One friend asked if our husbands had many close guy friends or spent much time with them. We all shook our heads no.
Now, my son is a psychology major, and he would say that a focus group of four is much too small upon which to draw conclusions, but I did so, nonetheless. Men don’t seem to share the intimate details of their lives the way women do. We are more emotional and that is a good thing.
I get angry when being emotional is deemed a bad thing. We need our emotions to help guide us. We can’t let them take over our rational thought, but they do play an important role.
I believe women connect on a very deep, emotional level. We need each other in a way it doesn’t seem men do. Especially when we have young children. Our lives and bodies change so dramatically after we have children, and only other women going through the same thing can truly understand.
Do you have a favorite character?
Maude is my favorite character. She reminds me of Betty White. She’s funny without realizing it and she tells it like it is. She thinks she’s got everything all figured out and doesn’t need anyone but her dog and the ghost. But, just like Simone, I’m glad she gets involved with the women who are there for the reunion.
What’s next for you?
My next novel, Harriet Hates Lemonade, is in the works. I love quirky characters like Eleanor Oliphant in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine or Ove in A Man Called Ove, so Harriet falls into this realm.
Harriet isn’t suicidal, like Ove, but she is isolated and cranky. She also thinks she doesn’t need anyone but doesn’t realize why. It is a story of how emotional abuse sneaks up on you and you can’t see the forest through the trees. She comes to the aid of a neighbor who is the victim of domestic abuse and finds herself in the process.
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Sounds like a fun read!
My ideal girls’ trip would involve lots of walking, lots of nature, and nothing too perilous. I’m not much of an adrenaline junkie 🙂
Thanks for reading! I’m the same. A good sightseeing trip or tour through a natural environment would be nice but no jumping out of airplanes or anything.
I am a huge fan of checking out the little places with people I care about so the perfect girls’ trip for me is more about the company and less about the destination. Also love the sounds of Harriet Hates Lemonade!
That’s very true. Your choice of travel buddies can make or break a trip, no matter where it is. And the group in this book definitely have shared interests and experiences that make them click, but they also bring a lot of baggage with them that leads to conflict.
Never made it to Montana, always wanted to go there, will have to rely on reading!
Maybe a trip to the nice beach to relax and go shopping of course hahah
Perfect trip! Thanks for reading!