THE WIDOW’S WAR

Name: THE WIDOW’S WAR
Author: Sally Gunning
ISBN: 0-06-079157-8

by Sally Gunning ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2006

Gunning (Dirty Water, 2004, etc.) paints the ethical, emotional and financial dilemmas of her refreshingly adult characters...

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Gunning’s quietly compelling historical novel places the limited rights of 18th-century New England married women, particularly widows, within the context of a pre-Revolutionary America in which rebellious attitudes toward English rule foment new ideas about freedom and individual rights.

When her husband dies in a whaling accident, 39-year-old Cape Codder Lyddie Berry is entitled only to a widow’s third of her husband’s estate. She is expected to move in with her daughter Mehitable and avaricious son-in-law Nathan Clarke, who, as Lyddie’s closest male relative, now controls her life. Her only ally is her husband’s lawyer, widower Eben Freeman. While Nathan is a stingy, narrow-minded Puritan, Eben, whose friend James Otis’s suit against Britain’s Writs of Assistance is a precursor to the Revolution, is more open-minded. Unable to live with Clarke, Lyddie defies social norms and moves back into her home—or one-third of it. Clarke’s plan to sell the cottage is thwarted because Lyddie’s neighbor Sam Cowett, a local Indian semi-accepted by the townspeople, refuses to relinquish his timber rights to the Berry property. When Sam’s wife Rebecca comes down with brain fever, a financially desperate Lyddie works as her paid nurse. Despite malicious gossip concerning her relationship with recently widowed Sam, Eben proposes marriage. A happy outcome seems possible until Lyddie finds herself unwilling to put herself at a man’s mercy, even reasonable Eben’s.

Gunning (Dirty Water, 2004, etc.) paints the ethical, emotional and financial dilemmas of her refreshingly adult characters in surprisingly lively shades of gray.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-079157-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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WINTER SOLSTICE

by Rosamunde Pilcher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2000

Tea? (Literary Guild main selection/Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection)

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The enduringly popular Pilcher (Coming Home, 1995, etc.) holds fast to a theme that has all but disappeared from American fiction: the healing comforts of domesticity and companionship. As winter sets in, an old estate in rural Scotland becomes a temporary home to an unlikely assemblage: Elfrida Phipps, a gently eccentric former actress; her friend Oscar Blundell, a dedicated musician and recent widower; Elfrida's distant relation, Carrie Sutton, an independent young woman recovering from the heartbreak of a failed love affair with a married man; teenaged Lucy, Carrie's quiet niece, who yearns to escape from her grandmother's London flat; and Sam Howard, a handsome textile-company executive whose American wife has just left him. As always, Pilcher is a sensible fairy godmother, bestowing happy endings upon the worthy and heartsick, while keeping the less agreeable characters on the other side of the Atlantic, where they evidently belong. The damp charms of the Scottish countryside are tenderly described; and the author's remarkably evocative sense of place and watercolorist's eye for muted detail help distract from the usual contrivances of a Pilcher plot (the unexpected legacy, the valuable heirloom sold to make a new beginning, etc.). In this little realm, this England, the men are sincere and the tweeds handwoven.

Tea? (Literary Guild main selection/Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-312-24426-6

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A PLACE LIKE HOME
by Rosamunde Pilcher

- BOOK REVIEW
COMING HOME
by Rosamunde Pilcher

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FLOWERS IN THE RAIN
by Rosamunde Pilcher

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THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 1961

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A major novel — the first since East of Eden — this brings into focus a conflict within a man's personality which will have wide, perhaps too wide, recognition value. John Steinbeck's special gift of compassion might have turned this into a sentimental exercise. As it develops, however, this is a taut, realistic, controversial portrait of Ethan Allen Hawley, scion of an old family, bearing his heritage of high ideals, intrinsic honesty — and fear of insecurity, while confronted with a shattered fortune- the old homestead the only thing left, and a job as grocery clerk in a store he had once owned. The pressures on him come to a head in this winter of his discontent, as his wife (who is basically an ideal mate, sensitive, perceptive, loving) lashes out at him for not giving his family the wherewithal to support their name; his son and daughter chide him for his failures — and a tiny inheritance of his wife, Mary, offers a possible loophole for taking a long chance. And then he is shown a way — involving a compromise with his integrity, a betrayal of his standards-and he succumbs, actually going beyond the initial opportunity to trap two men to whom he owes affection and loyalty. What happens is not wholly within the accepted pattern — nor is the outcome predictable. But Steinbeck sustains the reader's suspense, poses issues of responsibility — a man to his friend, to his employer, to his son, to himself — and leaves the resolution in final analysis to the reader. It is a fascinating and disturbing book, uncomfortably close to the challenge the average man faces in today's materialistic world.