The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

 It's the nature of small birds to sing their little hearts out. And it's the nature of God to hear them.~from The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

The Nature of Small Birds is a quiet, gentle book, the kind of read that is a comfort and a respite. Susie Finbeiner has created a family that is not always perfect, but is able to love perfectly. 

It is the story of 'hippie' couple Bruce and Linda and their three daughters Sonny, Mindy, and Holly. Readers meet the couple in 2013, in Bruce's voice, and in 1975 narrated by Linda, and in 1988 through Sonny's eyes. Each narrative voice is distinct.

Central to their story is Mindy, who Bruce and Linda adopted through Operation Baby Lift at the end of the Vietnam War. We know what she experienced by her early fearfulness, and we understand the love that surrounded her by her growth and happiness. 

Over 3,000 Vietnamese babies and children were brought to America. Some were left at orphanages because their family was unable to care for them; the parents never approved their removal. 

Adopting a Vietnamese child in 1975 created strong reactions in friends and family and even strangers. The pain of losing sons in the war was still raw and visceral. Bruce had lost a brother in the war, and his mother had a difficult time accepting Mindy.

Now grown, Mindy is exploring how to find her birth mother in Vietnam, supported by her family.

If all I've done with this one life is to be a son, husband, brother, dad, grandpa to these remarkable people, that's good enough for me.~from The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

My favorite voice was Bruce, whose reflections on life, family, and aging are beautiful. I also loved Linda's recollection of early motherhood, so like my own. Sonny's life in 1988, filled with malls and Cyndi Lauper and movies like 'Big', made me recall the world I knew when our son was born. 

The story is set in a Michigan 'Up North' setting, on the "pinkie knuckle" of Michigan.

I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Nature of Small Birds

by Susie Finkbeiner

Revell 

paperback $15.99ISBN: 9780800739355

E-Book

ISBN: 9781493430468

Pub Date: July 6, 2021

from the publisher

In 1975, three thousand children were airlifted out of Saigon to be adopted into Western homes. When Mindy, one of those children, announces her plans to return to Vietnam to find her birth mother, her loving adopted family is suddenly thrown back to the events surrounding her unconventional arrival in their lives.

Though her father supports Mindy's desire to meet her family of origin, he struggles privately with an unsettling fear that he'll lose the daughter he's poured his heart into. Mindy's mother undergoes the emotional rollercoaster inherent in the adoption of a child from a war-torn country, discovering the joy hidden amid the difficulties. And Mindy's sister helps her sort through relics that whisper of the effect the trauma of war has had on their family--but also speak of the beauty of overcoming.

Told through three strong voices in three compelling timelines, The Nature of Small Birds is a hopeful story that explores the meaning of family far beyond genetic code.

About the author

Susie Finkbeiner is the CBA bestselling author of All Manner of Things, which was selected as a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, and Stories That Bind Us, as well as A Cup of Dust, A Trail of Crumbs, and A Song of Home. She serves on the Fiction Readers Summit planning committee, volunteers her time at Ada Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and speaks at retreats and women's events across the country. Susie and her husband have three children and live in West Michigan.

Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed

If she told her family the truth, death would get on everything.~from Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed

Secrets. Children who don't really know their parents. Parents who don't really know their children. Trauma, consciously forgotten or unspoken, eating their souls.

Ninety-one-year-old Violet Swan's secret was not just the cancer killing her; guilt had dogged her life since a girl. A fire had killed her beloved father and sister. Evil men took advantage of the unprotected child. She escaped, a teenage vagabond crossing the country to the West Coast, pursuing a fragile dream of finding her place in the world.

Violet became famous for her abstract paintings. She lived in her art studio tower, her loving husband Richard protecting her solitude and running her business.

Their son Frank (Francisco, named for Francisco Goya) grew up imprisoned in himself, his silence smothering his marriage, his dutiful wife growing increasingly resentful. Their son Daniel had loved his Grand, Violet, but also felt his father's distance and had stayed away from home for years, living in LA as a filmmaker.

An earthquake begins the story, a premonition of the changes that will shake their relationships nearly to the breaking point. Daniel returns home bearing a secret. Violet finally agrees to allow her grandson to make a film interview; she will spill her secrets at last.

Deborah Reed saturates Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan with visual details, seen through an artist's eye. Music and literature enrich Violet's life.

Violet's story is unravelled throughout the novel, lending an urgency to keep reading, like a mystery novel; we want to understand the intricacies of life experiences that have brought this family to crisis.

I will warn that Violet's life includes trigger events. Violet is a survivor, a resilient woman. She finds salvation in the beauty of this world and in her art that endeavors to capture it.

Frank is mired in anger, addicted to television news. "How on earth was a person supposed to live a normal life?" he wonders, in despair.

Into their lives comes a small child and she changes everything and everyone.

An ordinary happiness runs through me...This is everything beautiful, this is love. Are you listening? Do you hear?~from Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan by Deborah Reed

I was very taken by this novel that glows under Reed's capable hands and beautiful writing.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

from the publisher: 

The story of a famous abstract painter at the end of her life—her family, her art, and the long-buried secrets that won’t stay hidden for much longer.

 Ninety-three-year-old Violet Swan has spent a lifetime translating tragedy and hardship into art, becoming famous for her abstract paintings, which evoke tranquility, innocence, and joy. For nearly a century Violet has lived a peaceful, private life of painting on the coast of Oregon. The “business of Violet” is run by her only child, Francisco, and his wife, Penny. But shortly before Violet's death, an earthquake sets a series of events in motion, and her deeply hidden past begins to resurface. When her beloved grandson returns home with a family secret in tow, Violet is forced to come to terms with the life she left behind so long ago—a life her family knows nothing about.

 A generational saga set against the backdrop of twentieth-century America and into the present day, Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan is the story of a girl who escaped rural Georgia at fourteen during World War II, crossing the country alone and broke. It is the story of how that girl met the man who would become her devoted husband, how she became a celebrated artist, and above all, how her life, inspired by nothing more than the way she imagined it to be, would turn out to be her greatest masterpiece.

 Pale Morning Light with Violet Swan: A Novel of a Life in Art
By Deborah Reed
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication October 6,  2020
ISBN: 9780544817364
paperback and audiobook  $15.99 (USD); $9.99 ebook

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

As a girl in the 1950s, I grew up watching my grandmother bowl. It came about like this:

The fire department burned down the house across the street from us, an early 19th c house like ours, one built by a founding family in the area. It was scheduled to be demolished and the volunteer fire department decided to burn it as a training exercise.

My parents and I watched from our second-floor windows as the house became enveloped in orange flames that lit our faces, the heat nearly too much to stand. My father recorded it all on the home movie camera, bought at my brother's birth, so I know it was around 1960 when the house was burned down.

In front of our house was the gas station built by my grandfather. What were they thinking of, starting a fire so close to gas pumps?

And on that newly vacated land, a bowling alley was built. My grandmother, who lived with us, joined a league and bowled with her lady friends. I would go with her to watch the games. I remember having to put on special shoes that always smelled funny. I recall the snack bar, the bright lights, the balls rolling back to us, and especially the noise of the balls knocking down the pins.

Once there was another kid at the alley with his grandmother. He talked about baseball the entire time. I don't know why I listened, I had no interest in Little League or baseball--or in even boys.

Reading Elizabeth McCracken's novel Bowlaway brought back those bowling alley memories. But the novel's bowling is of a different sort than the nine pin I grew up watching.

Our subject is love because our subject is bowling. Candlepin bowling. This is New England, and even the violence is cunning and subtle. It still could kill you. A candlepin ball is small, two and a half pounds, four and a half inches in diameter, a grapefruit, an operable tumor. You heft it in your palm.

Our subject is love. Unrequited love, you might think, the heedless headstrong ball that hurtles nearsighted down the alley to get close before it can pick out which pin it loves the most, the pin it longs to set spinning. Then I love you! Then Blammo.  

from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

There is it! In the first pages of the novel, the theme laid out for the observant reader to see. We become addicted to the very act that knocks us off our pins--Love--which can even kill us. Bowling as metaphor.

I loved this novel for the many lovely tricks of language and quirky descriptions.

Joe sat down on the bed and pulled the animal close, one of those accordion cats that got longer when you picked it up by the middle. from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

And how McCracken sums up things that knock you over with unexpected truthfullness--why didn't I think of that? you wonder.

But sorrow doesn't shape your life. It knocks the shape out. from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

McCracken tells us that this is a story about genealogy. We read about generations of the Truitt family and the people whose lives they touched.

Just before the turn of the century, a century ago, Bertha Truitt is discovered in a cemetery by Joe Wear, an orphan boy who works as a pin setter in a bowling alley.  Bertha is attended to by another visitor to the cemetery, Dr. Sprague, an African American doctor with a penchant for deep thought--and drink.

Bertha has arrived with a candlestick bowling ball and pin and a pile of gold. She builds a candlestick bowling alley, hires Joe, and marries the doctor. The local women come to bowl. Bertha builds an octagonal house for her and the doctor and their daughter Minna.

But tragedy strikes (pun intended) in the form of a molasses flood. The doctor sends Minna away to his people and he slowly lets grief consume him. First, he and Joe fashion a Bertha doll with carved candlepin appendages and a stuffed body.

Joe had hoped to inherit the bowling alley, as Bertha once promised. It is assumed that everything goes to Minna, but she never returns. When a Mr. Truitt comes along saying he is Bertha's heir, showing a family bible with the handwritten family births, he takes the alley over, banning females and marrying a local woman. Their children are yoked to the alley unwillingly.

When he was a young man the mysteries of the world seemed like generosity--you can think anything you want! Now the universe withheld things. from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken

It is a story of revelations, sudden deaths, marriages, love, and how life slams lovers apart. The characters and plot may be Dickensian, but the truths are spot-on. As one character says, "Lady, lady. All sorts of things happen in this world. This is only one of them."

I purchased the book from the publisher.

Bowlaway
by Elizabeth McCracken
Ecco
ISBN: 9780062862853
ISBN 10: 0062862855
On Sale: 02/05/2019

The Dependents: Wisdom in Grief

Something was keeping me from writing a review of The Dependents by Katharine Dion. I loved the book. I found it thoughtful and moving and surprising, and somber and soulful. Why was I wordless?

It came to me that I identified too much with Gene, the protagonist, a recent widower who can't move beyond the loss of his wife of 49 years.

I have been married for 46 years. I was a month from my 20th birthday when I married. And for all our ups and downs, good times and bad times, my husband has been my best friend. I could feel Gene's loss and knew it might someday be mine, or my husband's.

"In some mad inversion of time, grieving his wife's death resembled falling in love."-The Dependents

After Maida's sudden death, Gene learns that his wife was in many ways a stranger to him. Who truly knows and understands another? We are like locked chests, filled with treasures and terrors we can not share. Gene depended on Maida, saw only her best, assumed she was happy. But now he wonders, did she love him? Was Gene her 'one and only' or merely a comfortable compromise?

In college, the shy Gene latched onto the more worldly Ed. Ed pairs with Gayle, who Gene also liked, and introduced Gene to Maida. It took Gene a long time to make a move to make Maida his girlfriend; he fell in love with her first. He was elated when she agreed to marry him. He was lucky, he thought. The two couple's friendship has remained central to all their lives; they vacation together at the lake every year, raising their kids together.

Maida's dad set Gene up in his own shoe store business. Gene thought there was something honorable in fine footwear. But shopper's values changed, and the store closed. Maida had her work at the college child care center. Gene went to his old office out of habit.

Maida and Gene had a daughter, Dary, who has a daughter Annie. Dary is no comfort to her grieving father; she insists on an understanding of her mother that evades Gene's ideal. Dary insists Maida had other lovers before him and needs outside of her work as a childcare provider, wife, and mother. That she had given up some better version of herself to be Gene's wife.

As Gene begins to see who his wife truly was, he doubts everything he took for granted, struggling to understand how love was not enough, how he had failed the women he loved.

Gene must come to terms with the meaning of his life when so much had eluded him. When our life is nearing completion, should we second-guess our choices, regret the life we lived? Or realize it's what we wanted, after all.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

THE DEPENDENTS

by Katharine Dion

Little, Brown & Company

On Sale: June 19th 2018

Price: $13.99

ISBN-13: 9780316473880

Southernmost

At university, I took a course in religion with a professor who was ordained and had studied under Karl Barth. He told me that students come into his class with a naive belief and what he taught shook them for they had never viewed their faith community and beliefs from the 'outside'. And, the professor continued, perhaps they will later return to their church and reaffirm it, this time with a deeper kind of faith.

But letting go of what one is taught, the beliefs held by one's community is rare and hard. I watched church leaders endeavor to destroy a church over their perceptions of the denomination's Social Principles as approving sin. It is more common for people to destroy what they fear than to change what they believe. 

"None of us can know the mind of God. He's too big for that." Rev. Asher in Southernmost

I was drawn to read Southernmost by Silas House because it is about an Evangelical pastor who realizes that his narrow understanding of what God requires has created hate and bigotry, casting some into the outer darkness, and thus impairing his own soul.

When a flood leaves a gay couple homeless, Asher invites them into his house, a holy hospitality which his wife cannot tolerate. Asher has felt guilt over participating in his family's and community's condemnation of his brother Luke when he came out as gay.  When the gay couple comes to worship, Asher tries to lead his flock and his family to an understanding of love and hospitality, but they are recalcitrant. He can only move on, leaving his church and his wife.

Asher's wife Lydia keeps their son hostage, insistent that only she can raise him in the right values now that Asher has 'gone crazy'. In fact, she has been so fearful that gayness runs in the family, she rejects her son's sensitivity and non-violence. Unable to bear separation from his son, Asher rashly kidnaps him, then travels south to the Florida Keys to find his estranged brother. It is time to make amends for his sins.

Asher buys a moment in time alone with his son but knows it can't be sustained. He has to return his son home and face the consequences, hoping his wife will be merciful and not vengeful.

The pacing of the novel is like a symphony that starts with an Allegro and immediate action, then settling into a slower Adagio before rising to a fast-moving Scherzo, and finally, resolves in the manner of Tchaikovsky with a slower, more internalized, final movement.

I was interested by the characters' grappling with what God requires of us.

And what does the Lord require of you except to be just, and to love  kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8

"Hebrews says to entertain strangers," Asher tells Lydia. "Love the sinner, hate the sin," she responds. "You've gotten belief confused with judgment," Asher responds; "They are our neighbors."

Lydia holds steadfast to what she had been taught, resisting a changing world that tells her what she knows is wrong is now normal. She believes keeping Justin from Asher is a battle for her son's soul.

Asher has come to doubt everything he grew up accepting; "I have been on the road to Damascus," he thinks. His eyes have been opened. Paul had persecuted the Christians, and struck blind on the Damascus road saw the truth and converted to Christianity. Asher's rejection of gays, including his own brother, was blindness. "You can use the Word to judge and condemn people or you can use it to love them." Judging his brother became the seed of doubt in his faith.

Justin has his own faith, a sensitivity for the divine, seeing God in the Everything. Forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world, he believes. Forgetting is the hard part. Justin sees the greater truths and offers us a faith that transcends human institutions.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.


Southernmost
by Silas House
Algonquin Books
Pub Date 05 Jun 2018
ISBN 9781616206253
PRICE $26.95 (USD)

Final note: Luke tells Asher that he spend time in Grand Haven, Michigan, "in winter the most lonesome place I've seen." Amen! We spent one winter in an even smaller Lake Michigan resort town up the coast from Grand Haven. In winter the businesses closed--except for the bars and a small grocery store that was half open. The houses around us were empty, summer homes. You could walk down the middle of the streets. It was one lonesome place.

Elizabeth Berg's The Story of Arthur Truluv: A Model for Living

For six months Arthur Moses has packed a bag lunch and taken a bus to the cemetery to eat lunch with his wife Nola. He stops to visit her neighbors, reading their headstones and imagining the lives they had lived when alive. 

At Nola's graveside, Arthur sets up his folding chair and eats his sandwich. 

Arthur is eighty-five years old. His doctor congratulations him; he could live to be one hundred. It would be an empty life, now Nola Corrine the Beauty Queen is gone.

But on this spring day when the buds 'are all like tiny little pregnant women' and Arthur wishes Nola, like spring, would return again, even as a new born baby, Arthur notices he is not alone with his dead.

A teenage girl, who should be in school, is sitting under a tree. He has seen her before. This time, he waves. Her hand flies to her mouth, and thinking he has frightened her, Arthur leaves.

Maddy watches the old man walk to the bus. She is comforted by the graveyard. In life, she is a loner, a loser, a motherless girl with a distant father. She likes to take photographs of little things, blown up big. She sneaks out of the house at night to meet a handsome older boy. They don't talk much.

Arthur befriends Maddy, changing both their lives.

The Story of Arthur Truluv probes the depth of loneliness and depression in the elderly and the young, bringing disparate characters into clear focus, revealing their common humanity and mutual need. 

Arthur's untapped capacity for love expands and embraces Maddy, and then his cranky elderly neighbor Lucille. 

Named Truluv by Maddy, Arthur embodies true love not only for his lost Nola but also for the lost Maddy and unloved Lucille.

This charming, quiet novel will appeal to many readers. At first, though, I wondered what made it different? What made it worth reading over other books about friendship between the old and young or between the elderly?

In the Acknowledgements, Elizabeth Berg says, "When you write a novel as delicate as this one seemed to me to be, you can only hope that readers will see beyond the simple words on the page to the more complex meanings behind them."

And it hit me. This story is a kind of parable. 

"'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
“Who is my neighbor?”

Love your neighbor. And who is my neighbor? My neighbor is any person God has put in my path.

This gentle story reminds us to love one another. The cranky, the misfits, the girl with the nose ring, the ineffectual father, the unborn--and ourselves. 

Can we ever hear this message enough? It is today as revolutionary as it was millennium ago, going against common sense and financial sense, even against this administration's  governmental goals.

Our inability to love one another is the greatest threat to democracy today. We have cut ourselves off, categorizing our fellow human companions on this small planet as 'other', inferior, contemptible, unnecessary, mistaken, and misguided.  

Who should we love? The Parable of the Good Samaritan is not about helping those who are like us, supporting people of our ilk, class, race, faith. We are to love whoever God puts into our path. Right there, next door to us, the person mourning at the cemetery across from us, even the person who has caused another to feel unloved and rejected. We are to love the stranger, those who grieve, those who are angry, those who have been rejected, those who are warped, and those who cannot love themselves.

Arthur Truluv's example teaches us that by our acts we can impact the world for generations. Love your neighbor as yourself. If each of us resists the world's wisdom by this radical act, what a wonderful world it would be. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Story of Arthur Truluv
by Elizabeth Berg
Random House
Publication Date: November 21, 2017
$26 hardcover
ISBN: 9781400069903

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Shaker Heights, Ohio, is a subdivision built on order where well off families live the American dream: good jobs, home ownership, well-ordered lives, and gifted kids earmarked for prestigious universities. It seems the community channels the original Shaker settlers, being a "patch of heaven on earth, a refuge from the world," a utopia based on harmony and order.

The Richardson family, a defense attorney father and journalist mother with two sons and two daughters, appear to be the ideal family. Mrs. Richardson inherited a house which she lets for low rent, a "form of charity" for the deserving poor.

Itinerant artist Mia Warren and her teenaged daughter Pearl move into the rented home. Pearl has been promised their frequent moves are over. For the first time she has to care what her peers think of her; she's in for the long haul.

"They dazzled her, these Richardsons..."

Moody Richardson befriends Pearl, who is like no one he's ever met before. Pearl is enchanted with the Richardson family and spends her free time with them. She has a crush on the eldest boy Trip and learns fashion from Lexie. Izzy is the family misfit, born to 'push buttons,' an original thinker who won't fit in, but who finds a kindred spirit in the free thinking Mia.

Things get complicated when sexual liaisons arise. One results in an unplanned pregnancy.

Meanwhile, Mr. Richardson is defending a Shaker Heights couple in a legal battle over the Chinese American child they are adopting when the birth mother tries to get her baby back.

"I mean, we're lucky. No one sees race here.""Everyone sees race, Lex," said Moody. "The only difference is who pretends not to."

The local art gallery has an exhibit of photography. Mia is clearly in one of the portraits. Mrs. Richardson puts her reporter skills to work to find out who this Mia really is and what she has been running from.

There is so much going on in this novel: Racism; the question of who 'real' mothers are (Biological? Adopted? Spiritual?); the discrepancy between what a child needs and what it is believed they need; choices of conformity and self-realization.

It is a joy to read, the characters so unique and vivid, their story lines so delightfully intertwined. There are enough ideas and insights into American life to keep a book club going for several sessions. But the book reads like butter, quick and easy and sweet.

Celeste Ng's first book Everything I Never Told You was a huge critical and popular hit. In Little Fires Everywhere she will secure her place in reader's hearts, as well as her place as one of our best young writers.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.

Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
Penguin Press
On Sale Date: September 12, 2017
ISBN 9780735224292, 0735224293
Hardcover |  352 pages
$27.00 USD, $36.00 CAD
Fiction / Literary

The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas

When I was nine years old my best friend asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I told her I wanted to be an author. In a few years, I was writing stories and then poetry. I tried to get published for a while, then didn't try but kept writing. Then the poems dried up.

What happened? Life. Marriage, jobs because we needed money, a child.

"If I told you the whole story it would never end...What's happened to me has happened to a thousand woman."--Ferderico Garcia Lorca, Dona Rosita la Soltera: The Language of Flowers

This quote appears at the beginning of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, along with a quote from Olive Schreiner advising "live for that one thing" which is your aim in life. I recognized the story. I am one of the thousands who did not 'live for one thing.' But I do not regret my decision to put love first.

Joan Ashby, the heroine of Cherise Wolas' novel, was sidetracked away from her 'one thing,' that which she was born to be, which she had single-mindedly worked for and achieved before she allowed her life to be claimed by others and their needs.

This is the story of how Joan allowed love to determine who she was, and how love betrayed her, and the journey that brought her back to herself.

Within pages, I was mesmerized by Wolas' writing. The beginning of the novel recalled to mind an old movie, like Citizen Kane, with clips of news stories giving one an idea of the person they are going to explore. The novel begins with an article in Literature Magazine entitled "(Re)Introducing Joan Ashby" in which we learn that Joan was a prize-winning writer in her early twenties, a genius, but that it has been three decades since she last published. Next, we read several of Ashby's stories and excerpts from an interview with Joan.

"Love was more than simply inconvenient; it's consumptive nature always a threat to serious women." Joan Ashby 

When Joan meets Martin Manning she tells him right away that her writing will always come first and that she has no need to be a mother. Martin is smitten and appears to support her wholeheartedly. But when two months after their marriage Joan finds she is pregnant, Martin tells her, "I've never been so happy."

Martin makes her happy. Does Joan grant him this baby, which obviously will lead to another child? Or should she hold fast to her commitment and dedication to her art, have an abortion, even if it means losing her newly wed husband?

The decisions Joan makes over the next thirty years put her husband and children's needs before her own artistic life. She does love them, but they take everything she has and offer back little.

She feels a kinship with quiet Daniel and his love of books and story telling, but who opts for an unsuitable career. Eric is brilliant, testing the limits, achieving early success which he cannot handle. She is drained by their need, while longing to return to the one thing she wanted and needed above all else: the solitude of the creative life.

After a horrible betrayal, Joan packs up and leaves her life behind to find out who she is and what it is she wants. In India, practicing yoga, Joan contemplates her marriage and her children, and the role of motherhood in all its manifestations, slowly growing into an understanding of how she wants to spend the rest of her life.  The 500+ page book, for me, slows in this last third as Joan goes on an internal journey, including sections of the novel she is writing.

Joan's passivity and inability to carve out what she needed is a great part of her failed life. She is not completely a likable character when she accuses her husband of selfishness, for she did not stand up for herself and give him a chance to accommodate her needs. Their lack of communication indicates a flawed marriage. And Joan's need for secrecy about her writing life, novels and stories written in hours when she was alone, ends up harmful.

The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is an outstanding debut. I adored the nontraditional story telling which incorporated Joan's stories. The theme of the female artist's struggle to combine love and work will appeal to many women. I will be thinking about this book for a long time, and expect I will return to read portions as I grapple with my understanding of Joan.

I thank the publisher for a free ARC in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Cherise Wolas
Flatiron Books
Publication August 29, 2017
Hardcover $27.99
ISBN: 9781250081438