SUE'S REVIEWS--A PIECE OF THE WORLD

A Piece of the World 

by Christina Baker Kline

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

For Readers:

Christina Baker Kline's latest novel, A Piece of the World, is a fictionalized account of the  life of Christina Olson, subject of the famous painting, Christina's World, by Andrew Wyeth.

Christina Olsen was crippled by a virus at age three. Local doctors had no idea what caused the progressive wasting of her limbs, but she eventually had to crawl to leave the house, refusing the use of a wheelchair. Late in life she met Andrew Wyeth when he became enthralled by the old farmhouse in Cushing, Maine, where she had always lived.

Wyeth's place in the story is as important as Christina's, his dogged determination to paint what he feels at the place that greatly moves him. At first it's the location that calls to him, the land and the buildings in their coastal setting, but his attention eventually falls upon the people he comes to know.

Her parents are a salt-of-the- earth couple who expect more of Christina than seems reasonable. They refuse to baby her, even when she is very young, but she rises to the occasion in one gripping chapter after another. While still in her twenties, a relationship springs to life when the crippled girl  meets a student who summers in Cushing.

Here's an excerpt where Christina overhears her parents discussing her and her boyfriend:

"She's no beauty, but she works hard. I think she'd make a fine companion," Papa is saying.
"She would," Mother says. "But I'm beginning to wonder if he's toying with her."
My face tingles as I realize they're talking about me. I lean against the wall, straining to hear.
"Who knows? Perhaps he wants to run the farm."
"Mother laughs, a dry bark. "That one? No."
"What does he want with her then?"
"Who knows? To fill his idle time, I suppose."
"Maybe he really does love her, Katy."
"I fear . . ." Mother's voice trails off. "That he will not marry her."
Papa says, "I fear it too."

By the time Wyeth appears and installs himself at the farmhouse, Christina's scars, both physical and mental, have honed her into a person who is both admirable and pitiable (and ultimately paintable).

Buy the book!

William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers

ISBN 978-0-06-2356277

For Writers:

Many of you will have read Orphan Train, a well loved work by this same author, so you know Christina Baker Kline is a writer of considerable talent.

Using Christina's relationships with her family and friends, she enables us to see into the soul of a woman gone bitter with her insistence that people ignore her physical plight and treat her like anyone else. The story is told by switching back and forth between Christina's early life and young adulthood to her meeting with Wyeth when she's an old woman. It's an effective way to focus on her relationship with Wyeth while gradually revealing her past and the forces that have shaped her into the person that piqued his artistic interest.

So much of the story is based on fact that it's easy to be fascinated by the history, but even more beguiling to let the author take us to that atmospheric plane between fact and what she imagines for us. This one's a winner.

 

 

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SUE’S REVIEWS––THE NINTH HOUR

The Ninth Hour

by Alice McDermott

 Reviewed by Sue Ellis

For Readers:

Alice McDermott's newest novel, The Ninth Hour, is an easy pick after reading the back jacket. Three of her previous novels were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

The Ninth Hour is set in Catholic Brooklyn in the early twentieth century. The story opens with the suicide of Jim, an Irish Immigrant fired from his job at the railroad. He urges his pregnant wife to do her shopping early, then turns on the gas in their apartment and blocks its escape by jamming a coat under the door.

Sister St, Savior, making her way home following a weary day of tending an alms basket, encounters the sad scene and takes charge of the grieving widow, Annie. She oversees a quick burial for Jim in the church cemetery before objections can be made, and arranges work for Annie in the laundry of the Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor.

When Annie's baby girl, Sally, is born, she is cherished by her mother and the doting nuns, and grows up a carefree and obedient child. Here's an excerpt:

The days in the laundry grew longer for the two women when Sally started school, but when she returned, she brought her mother and the nun tales from what they called the wider world. She could capture her classmates' broken English, or their solid brooklynese, with perfection. She had the pastor's nasally Latin down to a T. She was a good and quiet child in the classroom, polite and shy on the street, but in the basement laundry of the convent, every impulse toward silliness, every outlandish pantomime or adolescent misfiring of elbows and feet, not to mention wickedness, was set free, and utterly indulged by her mother and the nun, provided--they were always reminding her, that she kept her voice low.

Sally decides she'd like to be a nun herself, having helped visit the sick and poor with the nuns on many occasions, but none of that prepares her for the people she meets on the train that carries her to her new assignment, their coarseness and greed. She returns home immediately only to find her mother at home with her lover, a man whose crippled wife Sally has helped care for.

Buy the book!

 

Farrar, Strous and Giroux
ISBN 978-037-428014-7

For Writers:

The characters are fascinating, likeable mostly, admirable and real. The story is told in part from the persepctive of Annie's grandchildren, so we get a sense of the repercussive results of a family touched by both tragedy and compassion. This author can set a scene authentically and believably, a real bonus for everyone.

SUE'S REVIEWS--GRACE

Grace

by Paul Lynch

 

For Readers:

The setting for Irish author Paul Lynch's third novel, GRACE, is nineteenth century Ireland during The Great Famine, a story told through the eyes of a girl. On a pre-dawn morning, Grace is jerked out of bed by a mother gone mad and dragged outside to have her hair hacked off with a knife. This eldest child of Sarah Coyle is driven from the only home she has ever known.

 Sarah is seven months pregnant, her husband has died, and there are four children who need more food than she can provide. She is out of options. The rain has been unrelenting, the crops are ruined, and then her landlord shows up, a man who ogles Grace, obviously no longer enamored with her mother, who has borne two of his children. Sarah knows she has to act quickly to save her daughter.

 After the butchered haircut, Sarah forces Grace to dress in her father's clothes and instructs her to ask for help from a friend in the village on her way out of town. She tells her daughter to take the guise of her 12-year-old brother, Colly, and to find work.

 Grace is terrified and loiters out of sight until Colly can catch up and travel with her. Tragedy follows almost at once when Colly drowns as a riverbank gives way in the surge of a flood. What follows is a heart-stopping adventure told through the eyes of a girl on her own. She will grow to womanhood walking the rough back-roads of an Irish countryside sodden with rain and rotting crops. And she will witness the decline of a people desperate to survive a food shortage that will eventually kill a million of them, and lead another million to seek their fortunes in America.

 During that terrible time (from 1845 to 1849), many people, like Grace, took to the road in search of work. Grace is a resourceful and moral girl who strives to live honorably even as she resorts to stealing and looting. She is constantly coached by the voice of Colly in her head, the dirty mouthed, proudly independent and irreverently funny brother she mourns.

The book is hard to put down, and it will leave readers haunted with a story that is all the more heartbreaking after a quick Google search turns up the fact that the loss of life could have been prevented, spoiled potato crops or not.

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

Published by Little, Brown and Company
ISBN 978-0-316-31630-9

Buy this book!

For Writers:

The author's gift with language is undeniable. A noun can expertly morph into a verb, sentence diagramming left dangling by its participle. The characters from170-years-ago are authentically imagined and vividly wrought. Here's an excerpt as Grace runs from danger:

She is chased by men from the backyard of a farmhouse into a dark that knows no moon and falls away like a precipice. Shouts noose the air for her neck. Gunshot travels unseen and soundless but for the report behind her announcing what has already passed. Grunt noise and the thunder-plod of footfall and a flaming lamp like some demon eye fixed in the dark upon her breathless singularity, and the way she runs into the cavernous night with nothing but her blanket and bobbing satchel, the accompanying report of a second shot, and how as she runs she tells herself to stop. And she does. Feels herself overcome, realizes in this moment she doesn't care anymore, about any of this, whatever you would like to call it—life, it you will—and so she stops running, stands awaiting the first fist to strike her head or for the shot to strike the kill. She closes her eyes but what happens is this—the two men chasing her like dogs to the perfume of violence run past her sightless in the dark.

SUE'S REVIEWS--THE MARSH KING'S DAUGHTER

The Marsh King's Daughter 

by Karen Dionne

For Readers:

Settle in for an excellent psychological thriller with Karen Dionne's, The Marsh King's Daughter. Helena Pelletier has buried her past as the daughter of a kidnapper and the young teen he abducted. Growing up in a remote area in Michigan, Helena had no idea that her mother was being held against her will. She was twelve before she learned the truth and met opportunity to take her mother and run. 

Their story made national headlines. Reporters became most interested in Helena, a “wild child” who could track and trap as well as her father, a man to whom she had been devoted and who had tattooed Helena to mark each success in her homeschool of wilderness survival skills. To escape the notoriety, Helena left town and started a new life, severing contact with her mother and grandparents. 

Fast forward several years and Helena has two little girls and a husband who know nothing of her past. And that's when she hears the news bulletin: her father has killed two guards and escaped from prison. Helena immediately knows that the police won't be successful at tracking him in the wild marsh where she grew up, the place she knows her father will surely head. Police will seek her out to assist, and her secret will be revealed.

The details of Helena's life before and after her escape are spooled out with admirable synchronization and creativity, but it is when she begins tracking her father that readers will be most riveted. Each chapter is introduced with a quote from a dark fairy tale with the same title: The Marsh King's Daughter, by Hans Christian Andersen, with chilling omens of things to come. Dionne's obvious understanding of a psychopath's issues of control and manipulation make the story leap from the pages—an excellent work by a talented author.

Reviewed by Sue Ellis.

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons

ISBN 978-0-7352-1300-5

Buy it here!

For Writers:

Karen Dionne cofounded Backspace, an online writers' community. Belonging to a writers' group is often a positive thing for those involved, a place to learn one's craft via critiques from fellow members.

It also didn't hurt that Dionne had a homesteading experience in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the locale she chose for her book. Writing what you know always lends a feeling of authenticity to a piece.