Author Archive
If you like big rambly family stories, Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos is just that. It takes place in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, a town of people of Welsh descent, where the Jones family lives - a place smack dab in the middle of tornado country. As a matter of fact, the reader learns early in the story that Hope, mother of Larken, Gaelan and Bonnie, “went up” in a tornado and never came down. Bonnie herself was carried away by the tornado, but was deposited in the top of a tree. The storm was the defining moment in the lives of those children, each of them reacting in their unique way which we learn when we meet them 25 years later.
When their dad, Llewelyn, the town physician, is killed by a lightning strike, the family comes together to bury him. They are forced by the town’s Welsh tradition, to spend a week with their community, not speaking, but singing their dad into the next world. The funeral also reunites them with their dad’s mistress of many years, Viney, who had also been Hope’s best friend and the children’s de facto mother.
Larken is the oldest sister, a respected professor of art history in Lincoln, who is overweight and pretty much obsessed with food. She carries on an almost-inappropriate friendship with the married man who lives upstairs from her. She babysits often for his daughter Esme, and eavesdrops on the arguments of Esme’s parents. Gaelan is a very fit and good looking weatherman for the Lincoln television station. But he is not a meteorologist; that presents a problem as a young, pretty and ambitious one gets a job at his station. He pretty much sleeps with any attractive woman he can, which gets him in trouble with said meteorologist. And Bonnie, the youngest daughter - who was with her mother right before the tornado struck - works part time at her smoothie stand, but spends most of her time combing the local area for remnants; odds and ends she finds on the ground. She treats them as treasured objects, going so far as to make scrapbooks and art pieces with them. She lives in a garage.
We hear from all these characters and learn through their voices their back stories and hopes and traumas. Included are excerpts from Hope’s diary so we get to learn a lot about her too. There are many secrets to be discovered here and a wonderfully - maybe predictably - wrapped-up resolution where everyone (but poor Llewelyn) ends up getting what they want, need and love. It was a pleasure to read this charming, witty novel.
November 4th, 2009
Lisa - Central
I think it was back in February that I swore off books that dealt with grieving, but I slipped off the wagon. It’s not really my fault…my book group selected Goldengrove by Francine Prose for our next read. Unfortunately for my resolution, this novel was good enough to encourage further slippage….
Goldengrove introduces us to Margaret and her younger sister, the narrator, Nico. Margaret is the more beautiful, bohemian, worshipped older sister to the more analytical, scientific, pudgy 13-year-old Nico. And because Margaret has Nico wrapped around her finger; Nico plays decoy for Margaret’s trysts with her boyfriend Aaron. We meet them while they float on a rowboat in the lake outside their house in the Berkshires on a promising early spring evening. Before the sun sets, Margaret is dead. Her undiagnosed heart ailment kills her after she dives into the lake.
Of course her death shatters Nico’s family. Her parents, hippies in the old days, inherited the family’s summer house by the lake. Henry, who runs his bookstore, the Goldengrove of the title, loses himself in a book he’s writing about end-of-the-world stories of other cultures. Daisy buries herself in a haze of drugs. So neither of them notice when Nico begins to hang around with Aaron.
At first, the two bond over the loss of Margaret, feeling they’ve finally found someone that understands how they feel. They secretly get together to talk about Margaret and their bottomless sorrow. But as Nico starts dropping weight due to her emotional state and starts looking like Margaret, their connection escalates into a sexual attraction. Poor Nico struggles to navigate the possibility of very early sex, and equally, losing her own identity. Frequently measured against Margaret prior to her death, Nico finds it almost as easy to slip into her sister’s personality as it is for her to slip into Margaret’s favorite t-shirt. Hooked on old movies, thanks to Margaret, Nico realizes what’s happening when she sees Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo for the first time.
Prose has an intriguing character in Nico, though sometimes she seems older than her 13 years. I couldn’t help but like her. This is a rich little book that is more than just the story of the death of a sister. There are allusions to poetry, music and film. An examination of the process of healing. The slow emergence of a new person as Nico finally navigates her loss. It was definitely worth the slide off the wagon.
September 25th, 2009
Lisa - Central
I’ve had a fascination with the Salem witch trials since I first read The Crucible in high school. I followed up many years later with a research paper on the connection between midwifery and the trials. It’s such a sad passage in our colonial history. Martha Carrier was one of the women hanged in Salem, after refusing to admit to being a witch. Her descendant, Kathleen Kent, after hearing her family’s stories about Carrier, spent several years researching historical records to create a heart wrenching account in The Heretic’s Daughter.
The Heretic’s Daughter details early New England Puritan life. Martha married a Welshman, Thomas, who was rumored to have been the executioner of King Charles I in England. An immense but quiet man, he and his independent and obstinate wife scratch out a minimal living in Billerica, Massachusetts. When smallpox threatens their family, they sneak under the cover of night (violating the quarantine) to Andover, where they stay with Martha’s mother. But Andrew, one of Sarah’s 3 brothers, was already infected and through him, 13 people in the town get the pox and die, including Martha’s mother. The family stays on the farm, precipitating a dispute with her brother, who believes he should inherit the place.
In a environment where Indians were still raiding, killing and kidnapping colonists, and where smallpox threatened to kill off entire families, several young women begin to accuse their neighbors of witchcraft. When Martha’s brother, an alcoholic, is accused, he points the finger at his sister, Martha. Martha refuses to confess to the charges of witchcraft; as a matter of fact, she calls the accusers insane. Soon, all of her children but the youngest daughter are accused as well. The older boys, Richard and Andrew are tortured by a rope tied from their throat to their legs behind their backs - causing them to cut off their own air supply - until they confess. Told by Martha to do anything to save themselves, all of the children eventually accuse their mother of raising them as witches. Martha is easily convicted and is sentenced to hanging.
Told from Sarah’s perspective, the horrible events take on an even more evil character. Kent does a wonderful job of building the suspicion around Martha through her own daughter who, though very young, chafes against her mother’s stoic and outwardly cold personality. It takes the threat to her life for Sarah to see the iron-like strength and courage of her mother in the face of death. Kent especially brings the colonial world to life. For example, she demonstrates how the Carrier family completely falls apart when Martha is imprisoned. The loss of an important contributor to the family’s upkeep cripples their ability to keep up with the extraordinary amount of work it took to farm and raise a family. Though not a unique history of the witch trials, Kent’s version is nevertheless an affecting read.
For further reading, here’s a transcript of the trial of Martha Carrier.
August 5th, 2009
Lisa - Central
Before this month, I’d never heard of the Reform Firm. That was the name of a group of women in the Victorian era who fought to improve women’s education, among other feminist causes. During this time when all women were supposed to be married and the property of their husbands, those who couldn’t marry had very few choices. One of those few choices was becoming a governess. The English Woman’s Journal was founded by two members of the Reform Firm, Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes; they were hoping to influence old legislation that prevented women from owning property after marriage and kept women and girls from attending public schools. The Journal was published by the Victoria Press, which was run by Emily Faithfull; through the journal and the press, the women were able to employ many women to prove their theories by putting them into action.
Coincidentally, the last two books I’ve read involved these interesting women. Governess: The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres, Ruth Brandon includes a chapter on the women of the Reform Firm. Actually, the book takes up with governesses much earlier. Brandon, analyzing journals, letters and literature of the time, recreates the sad lives most governesses led. She begins with Mary Wollstonecraft, author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women, who actually spent a short time as a governess before her writing career took off, and includes Claire Clairmont (Lord Byron’s mistress); Anna Leonowens, the model for The King and I, among others. Brandon shows how precarious governesses’ lives were; always at the whim of their employers, they could be fired for any reason - getting on the wrong side of the mother, for example. As the middle class grew in the Industrial Revolution, more families were able to hire governesses to educate their girls, but they didn’t have the large estates that the wealthy did. As a result, governesses were forced to live intimately with the families, causing much strife. And wages dropped to unliveable levels. The final chapter tells how the Reform Firm began to work at challenging the social mores regarding women’s education, though it was still many years before schools allowed girls in.
The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue is a novel based on an illustrious divorce case in 1864. Helen Smith, British, but raised in Italy and India, captured the heart of a much older man, the Vice-Admiral Henry Codrington. They have a few good years of marriage and have two daughters. The Admiral is often away for long periods of time at sea. During one of those absences, Helen invites a good friend of the family, Emily Faithfull!! (she of the Victoria Press above), to live with her and keep her company. By the time Henry comes back Helen is tired of her husband and when the arguments ensue, Emily is asked to leave. Eventually the family is off to Malta on assignment, where Helen begins to “befriend,” if you know what I mean, a few of the officers. When the family eventually returns to London, one of the officers follows, and Helen is caught. The divorce was an incredible scandal, the trial sensational with accusations of rape and a lesbian affair. Though Emily remained a force in the feminist movement until her death, her name was always associated with the scandal.
Both books were incredibly good. Brandon writes a remarkably interesting and readable social history of a small aspect of the lives of Victorian women. Donoghue captures Victorian England so well, fitting in period details without interrupting the flow of the story. All three of her characters have been perfectly rendered; no one is the victim or the victor, each is a unique individual with a complex personality. For those as interested as I am in the Victorian age, add these to your list.
June 24th, 2009
Lisa - Central
I love David Sedaris. The persona he portrays in his essays is crabby, bratty, nerdy and terribly self-centered, but you love him anyway. His When You Are Engulfed in Flames, while not his funniest book, was very entertaining and provided more than enough chuckles, and at least one guffaw.
He is at his best when writing about the people he’s known. In “That’s Amore,” he describes Helen, a neighbor in his apartment building in New York. She’s a tiny Italian woman, who can’t cook worth a dime (imagine her famous “Tomato Gravy with Rice and Canned Peas” dish), and has a potty mouth - I won’t quote anything here. She says ‘terlet” and ‘earl” (toilet and oil) like my grandmother did. She’s mean and competitive. He makes her seem irresistible and someone you’d like to steer clear of at the same time.
Essays cover such deep and insightful topics as finding himself in a Parisian doctor’s waiting room in only his underwear, his parents’ art collection, and a nasty boil he got on his back. Fully one third of the book is an essay devoted to his efforts to quit smoking. The lucky duck decides to go to Tokyo for a month to change things up, to break him out of the habits he associated with having a cigarette. He takes a class to learn Japanese and is humiliated at being worse than that “little idiot Sang Lee” - the Korean student who started out worse than him. (The title of the book derives from his stay in Tokyo: it’s the translation into English of the Japanese instructions for a fire emergency.)
Irreverent, sardonic and silly, Sedaris is always a good read.
June 10th, 2009
Lisa - Central
I’m not a person who is fascinated by creepy news stories - celebrity trials, serial killers, mass murders - I don’t want to know about any of it. So I can’t explain why I was attracted to one of Joyce Carol Oates‘ latest novels, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike. It’s a story based on the life and murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old beauty queen who was murdered in her own house, and whose killer was never found.
In this novel the Rampikes live in New Jersey. “Bix,” a tireless skirt chaser, is climbing up the corporate ladder in a bioengineering firm; Betsey is a desperate social climber who keeps lists of the families she longs to be associated with in her upperclass neighborhood. She uses her children in her attempts to elevate her social status; first she pushes oldest child Skylar into gymnastics against his will, until an accident sidelines him. Next, when Edna Louise show promise as an ice skater, Betsey shunts Skyler aside and focuses obsessively on “Bliss” (Edna Louise’s skating name, delivered to Betsey by God).
Soon Bliss, with her dyed hair, ‘tasteful’ makeup, and provocative outfits, is winning skating competitions and her fame is spread beyond her neighborhood. The family environment becomes more toxic than ever; the children are medicated for syndromes you’ve never heard of to keep them under tight control. Bix is never around, and neither is Betsey, for that matter, as far as Sky is concerned. Poor little Bliss, transformed into a skating automaton, loves to skate, but is petrified that she will fall, and skates despite pain and injury. But then she’s murdered.
Sky narrates the story from 10 years later, when he is 19. He hasn’t lived with his parents since the murder, having been shipped off to a variety of private schools that protect the privacy of scandalized families. He survived his toxic family, but barely - he’s emotionally scarred and barely cleaned of his drug addiction. His cynical, grief-and guilt-laden voice transmits the pain he has endured all these years. His impressions of his family life from the viewpoint of a 9-year-old boy, his confusion over what happened on the night of the murder, and his painful forced separation from his parents sear into your heart. Oates’ commentary on our neurotic, fame and wealth obsessed society is spot on.
But the novel was overlong and could have used some editting (How can little ol’ me say that about JCO?!) The first 100 pages of this novel were gripping and compelling, but then the book seemed to wither under the repetitious cynicism of Skyler’s voice, the intrusion of footnotes, and the occasional stylistic tricks (eg. a story within the story). Having said that, it is a novel that has stuck with me for a while. It’s gotten many “starred” reviews from critics, and you can’t help but feel compassion and distress for Sky and his horrible aloneness. Finally, Oates gives us a resolution to the murder, which doesn’t exist for the JonBenet Ramsey case. You decide.
April 28th, 2009
Lisa - Central
I used to live in a town in Colorado where many hippies moved in the ’70s so they could get ‘back to the land.’ They lived in a variety of yurts, teepees, or log cabins and tried to grow all their food and can and freeze enough to make it through the year. I wasn’t that hardy. I just dabbled in making jams from the apricots and cherries that grew in orchards all around the valley. But I always enjoyed visiting my friends’ farms, and occasionally, farm sitting.
So I was intrigued by the back to the land theme of A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes. Set in the ’60s, in the small town of Fife, Idaho, this novel begins with the budding love affair of Thomas Deracotte and Helen Carmichael. They meet while they are attending Yale: he’s studying medicine, she’s an undergrad. They come from different backgrounds: she’s from an upper class Connecticut family; he was abandoned by his parents early in life, and grew up with his illiterate grandmother. They fall madly in love, defy her parents and get married.
And head West. They chose their locale carefully. A river is important as Thomas needed to fish. Cheap land is important. They find a farm in a town where a doctor is needed, and buy it sight unseen. Kind of a mistake; the buildings are unusable and they have to hire men to build the barn and house. Plus Helen gets pregnant right away and gives birth to Elise in their tent.
It doesn’t take too long for them to realize they made a big mistake. Thomas has misgivings about his fit as a doctor. It’s not the blood that makes him squeamish, but the intimate interactions with people that he can’t handle. He’s smitten by the river and spends almost all his time fishing. Helen is bored, lonely and finds she misses her old life, her friends and, surprisingly, her parents.
With Thomas at the river all the time, Manny, the hired hand, steps in as handyman, builder, farmer, and eventually, love interest for Helen. But then a tragedy ensues and we jump forward to 1976, when Elise is 16. She’s been raised almost entirely by Manny, and by her teen years has never really left the farm. She’s a talented horsewoman and one day meets Lucas at a rodeo. He draws her into his father’s fundamentalist church - her first real encounter with a loving, supportive, extended family. Until they see her flaws, and condemn her as a sinner.
Much, much more happens in this book, most of it pretty sad. But this is one of those stories where the lonely and miserable find each other and cobble together an unusual family that just might work. That starts out kind of miserable, but ends up kind of hopeful. What makes this one special, though, is Barnes’ intimacy with the Idaho landscape. You can almost hear the river whooshing by, smell the fishy, silty musk of the banks. A captivating story.
March 12th, 2009
Lisa - Central
It is my good fortune to have discovered Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street. It has many of the things I love in a book: a London setting, allusions to British Literature, precise and lyrical language and a mesmerizing story. Yum.
The titular house is owned by Abigail, who bought it with money inherited from an aunt. Her best friend from college, Dara, lives on the first floor. Dara is actually the center of the story - the three other main characters all have a connection with her. The story is told in from the points of view of these four characters, yet is not the same tale told four times. It’s a gradual unraveling of the lonely lives of the narrators, each one’s life illuminating the others.
It begins with Sean, a Keats scholar, who has just moved in with Abigail - who pursued him so relentlessly that he left his wife for her. He is having difficulty with the last section of his dissertation and he easily drops it when he gets a contract for a book on euthanasia. But right after he moves in, Abigail almost disappears from his life; she is furiously trying to build a new theater company. While Sean is temporarily distracted by the interviews he does for his book, his loneliness is palpable.
We hear next from Cameron, Dara’s father, of his life while married to Fiona and raising his two children. A lovely man - he is a wonderful husband and father - he has a secret flaw. A dabbler in photography, he finds himself drawn to the photos Charles Dodgson - Lewis Carroll - took of Alice Liddell. His life is changed forever during a camping trip when his flaw is suddenly revealed.
Dara, a therapist for a woman’s center, moved into an apartment in Abigail’s house in order to have a private place to bring her new boyfriend, Edward. She met Edward much like Jane Eyre met Mr. Rochester - while she was quietly drawing a river scene, Edward fell at her feet. Dara becomes overly devoted to him - canceling dates with Abigail and others to be with him. Her dependence on men dates back to the same aforementioned camping trip.
Lastly we hear from Abigail. Raised by parents who seemed just like Jeanette Walls’ in The Glass Castle, she moved constantly when she was a child, so much so she barely went to school. She was grounded by visits to her grandparents every summer. Her grandfather, a German immigrant, stressed the importance of school and read to her from Dickens - the author he read to learn how to be English. She met Dara in college; Dara took her home on holidays and gave her the family she so needed.
Livesey has created some fascinating characters here. The connection each has with the British authors enriches each person’s narrative. Though there is lots of loneliness and sadness in this novel, it is filled with a certain hopefulness, well, for most of them. Great novel.
February 19th, 2009
Lisa - Central
As much as I enjoyed the story, the setting and the writing in this book, Split Estate by Charlotte Bacon has me sworn off books on grief. Enough is enough already. I don’t think I can take the pain anymore. (Let’s see how long this resolution lasts!!)
This is a haunting story about a family’s reaction to the suicide death of Laura King. Laura jumps from her 20th floor New York City apartment, leaving her husband Arthur and two teenaged children, Cam and Celia, to deal with it. She left no note. Everyone thought she was doing pretty well.
Originally from Callendar, Wyoming, Arthur decides to move his family back home to his mom’s ranch to recover from the trauma. They drive across the country to Callendar, to Lucy’s diminished ranch. Once thousands of acres, finances have forced her to sell much of it off, though she’s resisted the pressure to sell mineral rights. (Actually, that’s where the title comes from. If I got this right, if ranchers sell their mineral rights, they own only the surface of the land. Hence a split estate. And, of course, the subsurface rights take precedence over surface rights. So miners can trash your ranch if they want.) Anyway, Wyoming’s difference and familiarity make Arthur feel the family could recover from this worst of blows.
Bacon gives each character a voice, so each one tells of their reaction to the suicide. Arthur gets a job in a law firm, keeps what he thinks is a close eye on his kids, and flirts with his boss’s wife. His mother Lucy, a retired teacher, makes everyone conform to her schedule but becomes a literary grafitti artist, spraying poetry on methane wells. Gorgeous Cam has a job as a handyman, and sleeps with the daughter of his boss. And shy Celia works in the kitchen at a dude ranch, and becomes friends with one of the wranglers. All of them are a mess, either not sleeping, not eating, or trembling, and none of them able to talk to each other about their grief. All this self-destruction makes for a low-grade tension that ignites at the climax. The ending totally sucks.
If you’re not tired of grief stories, this book is so beautifully written, you might want to try it. Bacon gets the voices just right. You’ll just love Lucy. And the rest of them, really. But the ending sucks.
February 6th, 2009
Lisa - Central
It’s not often that I don’t finish a book. But I put this one down one day and never got back to it. I wanted to like it. I’ve read some of Edwidge Danticat’s fiction and loved her lyrical language and her sense of place. But her family history, Brother, I’m Dying, just didn’t keep my interest, and certainly did not show the same beautiful language of her other books. But maybe you should decide for yourself. It was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.
Danticat was born in Haiti, right around Duvalier’s time. The country is a mess politically, with people disappearing and being murdered, rank with poverty. Danticat’s dad emigrates to New York when she is 2, followed by her mother, when she is 4. She and her younger brother are left in the care of her Uncle Joseph, a pastor. It ends up being 8 years before she joins her parents. In the meantime, Joseph, a sweet and caring man, loses his voice to throat cancer, and cannot preach to his flock, something he lived for. Danticat becomes his interpreter, helping him on his trips to shops and doctors. But it also makes the separation from her parents much more difficult, since her father would call Joseph and would share much more information with him than with his very young daughter.
Eventually her parents bring her to New York, where she does not feel part of the family she belongs to. She has 2 more brothers, who immediately take to their older siblings. But the long separation has taken an emotional toll.
The story is told in 2 time periods, the past and the near present, when Danticat finds out she is pregnant at about the same time that she finds out her dad is dying from a lung ailment. Her dad is very accepting of his situation and works at preparing his family for the inevitability of his death.
And this is where I stopped. Maybe my expectations were too high for this book. But the emotional distance she felt throughout her life, seemed very apparent in her writing. It seemed as if she was writing a news story in very simple language with very little subjectivity or emotional connection involved. I don’t get it, either, because all the reviews I read rave about it. Maybe if I had hung on, through the total implosion of Haiti and Joseph’s doomed final trip to the United States, it would have resonated more for me. But maybe I also stopped just in time. Reading once again about a country who treats people like chattel (and I’m not mentioning which country here) is just too painful.
December 22nd, 2008
Lisa - Central
Valerie Martin is a wonderful writer. Somehow she grabs you from the first sentence, makes you love her characters, and holds your interest to the very end. Each of her novels is different: Mary Reilly features the maid of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Italian Fever is a ghost/mystery story; and Property involves a slave and her owner before the Civil War (she won the Orange Prize for this one, beating Zadie Smith and Donna Tartt). Yet Martin brilliantly mines the intimate relationships of her characters and her writing is always hypnotic.
In her newest novel, Trespass, Martin explores a woman’s reaction to her son growing up. Chloe and Brendan Dale are a middle-aged parents of Toby, a student at New York University. Chloe has been hired to illustrate a new edition of Wuthering Heights; Brendan is working on a history of the Crusades. Chloe has a fabulous studio (well, I think it’s fabulous) out in the back acreage of their rural home, heated by a wood stove and frequented by the local fauna and her hunter cat Mike. Her peace is disturbed, however, by a man who hunts these animals on her private property. That, the impending Iraq War, and her son’s new girlfriend have set her completely on edge.
I found it difficult to understand why Chloe doesn’t like Salome - I thought she was cool. She’s a student at the university, from Louisiana, where she, her father and brother escaped to from Croatia during the Serbo-Croatian War after her mother was killed. Salome is beautiful, sensuous, direct, and very mysterious. Toby is totally smitten. Chloe thinks he’s making an awful mistake - to Chloe, Salome is obviously a golddigger - and can’t hide her feelings. So when Salome gets pregnant and the couple decide to marry, Chloe is furious and says some awful things to Toby.
But then all hell breaks loose. Salome goes missing right after she and Toby elope. She’s decided her mother was not dead, and goes to Croatia to find her. Toby can’t stand being away from his pregnant wife, understands why she wants to be with her mother, and so quits school to join her. Soon Brendan is there also, trying to get the kids to come home.
I have a couple of minor complaints about Trespass, but don’t let them keep you from reading it. Martin ends the story a bit too neatly and abruptly, and it seems to me, sacrifices a character to wrap it all up. And I had wished she had drawn a stronger connection between the horrors of the 2 wars that provide the backdrop of the novel. But there’s more to this story than what I have covered. Salome’s dad, Branko, and her brother, Andro, are interesting characters, and a compelling narrative of the Bosnian War give a chilling record of that hideousness. A great read.
November 17th, 2008
Lisa - Central
For some reason I’ve avoided reading Ursula Hegi’s books since her brilliant Stones From the River. I don’t know why, because I loved that book. Maybe I thought they would all be set in Germany, or during the war, or something. Thank goodness I decided to read The Worst Thing I’ve Done. A story about a love triangle between 2 men and a woman, this is a terrific novel.
Annie, Mason, and Jake have known each other since infancy, and have grown up completely attached to each other. But they also compete for each other’s attention, their relationships rife with jealousy and secrets. Mercurial Mason gets the girl and marries Annie - seemingly the only way the three of them could stay friends. On their wedding night, Annie’s father and very pregnant mother are killed in a car accident. Annie’s sister Opal survives the accident, and the 3 friends agree to raise her together. But this is all back story. The first thing you learn in the book is that Mason has committed suicide. He killed himself in Annie’s New England studio -she’s a collage artist - and therefore ruins the place for her. So she moves in with her mother’s dearest friend, Aunt Stormy, on Long Island.
Hegi gives all the characters their own chapters, and the story unfolds as a collage. Slowly the complex relationships become clear. We learn from Mason what happened the night before his suicide. We see how Opal deals with losing so many people in her early life. And you see how each of the threesome deals with the interplay of attraction and jealousy until Mason pushes the wrong buttons and changes everything. And we find out the worst thing they’ve all done.
Okay, I may be prejudiced in favor of this book. I grew up on Long Island; the bulk of the story takes place in North Sea, a town on the South Fork of the Island. Hegi elicits a magical, almost mystical, world of the oceanside through Aunt Stormy, a kind of natural naturalist. Whenever she takes someone out in the kayak, she weaves an encyclopedic tale of the water and its inhabitants. But besides all that, Hegi has done a masterful job of creating some very real and rich characters, and of excavating the themes of love, loss, tragedy, and loyalty. Despite the tough emotional themes, this is a powerful and moving novel.
November 3rd, 2008
Lisa - Central
Previous Posts
