A heartwarming novel that respects grief and honors the special bond between a grandparent and grandchild.
Moore (Time’s Tyranny, 2017, etc.), a winner of an Independent Publisher Book Award, delivers a story about grief, family bonds, and the transformative power of love.
Tilda Carr has long had difficulty sleeping, but one night, she finally has her first restful slumber in months—only to wake up a widow. Her 40-year marriage ends with her husband Harold’s sudden death in his sleep, and she’s left reeling. She and her daughter, Laura, make an oath to get through the five stages of grief before Harold’s yahrzeit—the one-year anniversary of his death. However, the coming year has more in store for them than they realize. Tilda’s granddaughter, Tilly, hides her pain at her beloved grandfather’s passing as well as another, secret struggle that she barely understands herself. Tilda’s attempts to reach out to her are well-intentioned but clumsy at first and fraught with common, generational misunderstandings. To make matters worse, she also takes on the emotional burden of a neighbor and his daughter, whose mother left them to start a new life. Tilda struggles to be a good friend, a good mother and grandmother, and a woman navigating a life without her own best friend. This is an intimate look into the aftermath of spousal death that offers poignant observations on how grief can hide around every corner—in scents, in songs, in strangers. Tilda is so consumed by her loss that she closes herself off emotionally and doesn’t allow herself to move forward. When she gets an offer to go on a trip with a male friend who could turn into a romantic partner, her negative reaction captures how one can be unwilling to betray one’s grief with happiness. The novel also shows how Tilda fails to hear a loved one’s quiet pleas for help. As the protagonist begins to heal, she realizes how vital it is to cherish one’s relatives and how important it is to listen with an open, accepting heart.
A heartwarming novel that respects grief and honors the special bond between a grandparent and grandchild.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-477-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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