It’s the end of summer, and Mabel is about to shutter her
guest cabins when a car drives up. Out come a teen aged girl with a tiny baby,
and an angry, tired man who completely ignores them. Mabel rents them a cabin for
a few days; she isn’t surprised when one day the man drives off and doesn’t
come back. She allows the girl to stay on, then finds them a place to stay for
the winter, in a cottage behind the house of a friend of hers, Iris. Iris wants
no rent- in fact, she’ll give the girl money- she just wants a few chores done
and she gets to spend a couple of hours a day with the baby.
Three years later, June and Luke are still living in the
cottage. She’s made a couple of friends, and has created a life for herself,
working for Iris as Iris gradually declines. She’s formed relationships with
others in the small town. It’s a pretty decent life, if strictly circumscribed.
Then Iris’s daughter, Claire, returns. Not only has she been
gone for years with no contact, but she moved out of the main house at 13 and
lived in the cottage until she was 18 and could leave. During her teen years
she was basically brought up by Duncan, a local lawyer, who signed her absence
slips, took her to the doctor, and attended parent-teacher meetings- Iris was
happy to turn over the raising of her child. She’s now a photojournalist-
largely taught by Oldman, a photographer during WW 2- who has won awards and
created a life that has nothing to do with the place she grew up in. Claire
brings with her, as her driver, a badly battle scarred Viet Nam vet named Sam,
a man who works at the soup kitchen that she also is associated with.
Everyone in this novel is mourning something; a spouse lost,
a spouse better forgotten and the life they ruined, a childhood lost, their own
looks lost. Everyone deals with loss differently, but they all have one thing
in common: they have all withdrawn from the world to some degree. Who will be
able to get over their loss and move on into life again?
I loved the writing; some reviewers have criticized the long
sentences but I have no problem with them. I found it difficult to follow the
dialog at times; the author doesn’t use quotation marks and frequently doesn’t
identify who is speaking. But it’s not bad enough to be uncomfortable. I loved
the descriptions of the area the story takes place in, and the mundane settings
of everyday life. The narrative changes point of view with each chapter. It’s a
rather lovely portrait of damaged people surviving as best they can, although
some of the people seem almost too good to be true.Also, the cover is beautiful.
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Neither of these things influenced my review.
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