Review of THE SECRET KEEPER OF JAIPUR by Alka Joshi

 3.5 Stars

Having enjoyed The Henna Artist on my morning walks, I opted to pick up this sequel, also in audiobook format.  Though The Secret Keeper of Jaipur could be read as a standalone, I’d strongly recommend reading The Henna Artist first since most of the characters are introduced in it; though Joshi recaps what happened, a reading of the first book will add to one’s understanding of relationships.

The Secret Keeper of Jaipur takes place in 1969, 12 years after The Henna Artist.  Lakshmi is married to Dr. Kumar and lives in Shimla, in northern India.  She works at her husband’s clinic and maintains a healing herb garden.  Malik, now 20 years old, has become romantically involved with Nimmi, a Himalayan widow with two young children, but Lakshmi sends him to Jaipur to learn about the construction trade from her friend Manu Agarwal. 

In Jaipur, part of the Royal Jewel Cinema collapses on opening night.  Manu is being held responsible for the accident but Malik suspects that someone else is to blame for using building materials of inferior quality and doctoring invoices.  Lakshmi returns to Jaipur to help Malik clear Manu’s name and reputation. 

This is very much a plot-driven novel.  Unfortunately, the plot relies on a lot of coincidences.  Because of Nimmi and her family, Lakshmi learns about gold smuggling which ends up having a connection to events in Jaipur?!  Much of the plot is predictable; certainly, the identity of the person who bears responsibility for the cinema incident is no surprise.  The resolution comes very quickly in the end; like that of The Henna Artist, this ending is very tidy. 

The narrative is told from three perspectives, those of Lakshmi, Malik, and Nimmi.  I found Nimmi’s sections least engaging, though they do include a lot of information about Himalayan tribal culture.  The relationship between Nimmi and Malik is underdeveloped so, at times, the impression is that Nimmi is less important as a character and more of a device to reveal gold smuggling tactics and a catalyst for Lakshmi’s growth. 

In The Henna Artist, Lakshmi learns how her pride and ambition sometimes clouded her judgment.  In The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, she is like a mother who must learn to let her child be independent.  I always enjoy reading about dynamic characters, but I was rather surprised that Malik was not the one who showed most growth.  Though the youngest of the main characters, he seems to be the wise one throughout. 

I’ve just learned that there is going to be a third book to complete what is being called The Jaipur Trilogy.  I will certainly get it, again in audiobook format, because the first two books, though not literary masterpieces, are entertaining and immerse the reader in a culture that has always fascinated me. 

Review of PHASE SIX by Jim Shepard

 4 Stars

This book could destroy any comfort you are feeling in the (hopefully) waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Sometime in the near future, eleven-year-old Aleq and his best friend Malik live in Ilimanaq, a tiny community in Greenland.  One day they explore a rare metals mining site where they play on a “giant pile of excavated permafrost” and are exposed to “a cluster of molecules that had previously thrived in the respiratory tract of an early variant of the Bering goose and that had been trapped . . . during the Holocene glaciation [and now] had been reintroduced to the air and the warming sun.”  Shortly after their return home, everyone starts becoming ill.  Though the number of dead climbs, Aleq survives.    The Center for Disease Control sends Jeannine Dziri and Danice Torrone to Greenland to investigate the illness.  They need information from Aleq, but he is severely traumatized.  The disease has a mortality rate of about 40 percent and spreads so rapidly that “By day thirty-five, estimations were as high as fourteen million infected.”

The novel focuses on four characters:  Aleq, Jeannine, Danice, and Val.   Aleq, as a survivor of the initial infection site, is kept in quarantine and studied to determine why he has survived.  Danice and Jeannine and researchers around the world work to determine what causes the illness, how it spreads, how to treat the sick, and how to stop the spread.  Val is an ICU physician who treats patients on the front lines; her hospital is quickly overwhelmed by the number of cases.

The book was penned before COVID-19, though references to it were added during editing.  The reactions in the book certainly are exactly what we have experienced in the last 1 ½ years:  panic, uncertainty, resistance to public health restrictions, and an overload of media coverage and speculation.  Mention is made to a flood of online misinformation:  “reality was being abandoned the way you might walk away from farmland that had lost its water source.”  Anyone who followed the WHO press conferences will nod at this description:  “The WHO, which had followed its global alert with a series of travel warnings and then a series of travel bans, and then a series of situation bulletins, on day thirty-six finally ceased its foot-dragging and upped its announced pandemic level to Phase 6, its highest, designating for anyone who might have missed it by this point that a global pandemic was officially under way.”  Hearing about low vaccination rates in Republican states, I agreed with a suggestion that there be “an immediate halt to all flights out of states with Republican governors to reduce the spread of political imbecility.”

Interspersed throughout the narrative are short informational passages giving the reader some sobering facts:  “Well before COVID-19, a survey in Global Public Health in 2006 had caused a stir in the international medical community by revealing that 90 percent of the epidemiologists polled predicted a major pandemic – one that would kill more than 150 million people – in one of the next two generations.”  Did you know that “On average, the world encounters one new communicable disease each year, as pathogens evolve by leaps and bounds in ways that enhance their durability, transmissibility, and virulence”?  If you’re a betting person, “’Who would you put your money on?  Humans have been around for what, two hundred thousand years?  And bacteria for like three and a half billion.’”  Anyone wanting to dismiss Shepard’s opinion might want to look at the extensive bibliography provided. 

Shepard understands human nature because he suggests that we tend to revert to our old ways once a crisis has passed:  “The COVID-19 pandemic had exposed the way America’s health care system, having been stripped to the bare bones to maximize profit, was uniquely ill-equipped to handle the dramatically added burdens of disaster.  But as in so many instances in American politics, after the lesson had been learned nothing had been done about it.”  Later, there is reference to there being “no adequately funded or internationally coordinated system of focus, cooperation, and response.  Public policy’s position in the U.S. and a surprising number of other countries had been to rebuild the status quo and then to sit back and wait for the next avalanche, as though pandemics were not a recurring natural phenomenon.”

In the book, the bonds of love and friendship that are formed in the midst of the catastrophe are heart-warming, but if such bonds are all that we have to bring us through a crisis, we are in deep trouble.  The fate of some characters and the ending may leave readers angry and frustrated, but given the book’s subject matter and message, it is the only acceptable conclusion. 

I recommend this cautionary tale, but I warn you that it is not escapist literature. 

Review of GIRL A by Abigail Dean

4 Stars

This is a psychological family drama which focuses on the effects of shared trauma on the siblings of one family.

When she was fifteen, Lex Gracie escaped and rescued her siblings from the family home where they were held captive and abused.  Fifteen years later, she is a successful New York lawyer who returns to England because her mother, who recently died in prison, made Lex the executor of her estate.  Wanting to change the family house into a community centre, a positive space for children, she has to reconnect with her siblings to solicit their agreement to the project.  The Gracie children were adopted by different people in different regions of the country, and Lex has not seen most of her siblings for years. 

Lex is the narrator.  During her time in England, as she contacts her siblings, she thinks back to the experiences of the seven children raised by a religious fanatic and his wife.  These flashbacks show the physical and psychological abuse to which the children were subjected.  There is not a great deal of detail, though we learn they were given little to eat and were kept bound to their beds.  The vague depiction of abuse means the focus is on how the individual children have coped since their escape.

As would be expected, each sibling has been affected differently by his/her captivity.  Certainly, their ages and the type of (mis)treatment they received have influenced their reactions.  For example, Ethan, the eldest son exploits his past and has become an academic who writes about how education can overcome childhood trauma, Gabriel is the troubled one who is in a psychiatric hospital, and Delilah has found solace in religion.  Lex takes pain to present herself as smart, strong, and resilient, but her detached, controlled tone suggests that she has built protective walls.  Like for her brothers and sisters, there is no real escape from what she endured for years.

Lex has a different relationship with each sibling.  Her relationship with Delilah, for instance, is the most difficult; Delilah was the pretty daughter and she manipulated her father into becoming his favourite.  Ethan is a disappointment because Lex believes that since he was the oldest, he should have been the one to plan an escape; she describes him as having a “deficit of courage, and a good face for sympathy.”  Lex is closest to Evie with whom she shared a room, just as Delilah and Gabriel are close because they shared a bedroom.  The dynamics among the siblings are very realistic, especially when certain information is divulged. 

Lex’s relationship with her mother is also problematic.  She is unable to forgive her mother for not doing anything to help her children.  There is some indication that she was a victim of abuse as well and lived in thrall of her husband.  Delilah, for instance, has some sympathy for their mother, but Lex’s feelings are clearly shown in her decision to relegate her to an unmarked grave in the prison.

Towards the end there are some revelations that may come as a surprise to some readers, but there are actually many clues, especially in the flashbacks.  I found that those revelations only confirmed the suspicions I had formed earlier. 

This is not a light read; it is bleak and offers little hope.  Nonetheless, it is a worthwhile read because it is realistic and thought-provoking.  How would you react to years of abuse and deprivation? 

Review of OH WILLIAM! by Elizabeth Strout (New Release)

 4.5 Stars

I was excited to read the third book in the Amgash trilogy.  My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible are amongst my favourite books, and Oh William! is another masterpiece.

Lucy, now in her early sixties, is grieving the death of her second husband David.  But the book focuses more on Lucy’s relationship with her first husband, William Gerhardt, with whom she still has a friendly and supportive relationship.  William is floundering after a third failed marriage and calls on Lucy to accompany him on a trip to Maine after he has uncovered a family secret.  The trip becomes a journey of self-discovery because Lucy discovers truths about herself as she gains insights into others’ behaviour and choices.  She comes to better understand her ex-husband and her marriage to him, as well as her former mother-in-law, Catherine Cole. 

This is very much a character study; it is introspective, almost meditative, not plot-driven.  What emerge are complex sketches of characters, especially Lucy and William.  A professor’s wife once described Lucy as a girl with “’absolutely no sense of her own self-worth’” and though Lucy is a successful author, she still has lingering self-doubt.  For instance, she always seems amazed when someone mentions having read her books and recognizes her.  Her insecurity also shows in her concern about how others perceive her, worrying that she might “still give off the faint smell of what [she] came from.”  About ten times, she mentions feeling invisible.  She also seems overly concerned about being misunderstood because she constantly uses the phrase “What I mean.”

After reflection, Lucy comes to understand that she is not alone in feeling “what it is like to be marked as separate from society.”  She acknowledges that though she has definitely been scarred by her difficult, impoverished childhood, she has the ability to love, something which surprised even a psychiatrist familiar with Lucy’s upbringing.  She hates when William retreats into himself and doesn’t communicate, but realizes that she too did that and so denied William “any chance of comforting me – oh, it was an unspeakably awful thing.”  She realizes too that she can be self-absorbed. 

We learn about William through Lucy’s thoughts and comments.  She describes him as being distant often:  “with his pleasant distance, his mild expressions, he was unavailable.”  At one point she mentions being so tired of “the petulant boy beneath his distinguished and pleasant demeanor.”  However, she also mentions his sense of authority and admits, “This authority was why I had fallen in love with William.”  Though her marriage to William had been for a time “a hideous thing,” she is grateful he “ushered me into the world” which she knew little about because of her childhood.  Each of us has positive and negative qualities so I loved how Lucy would describe something negative about William but then continue with “But there is this” or “Except I do need to say” and an example of something positive about him.

Oh William! is the perfect title.  Lucy utters the phrase often, though it expresses different emotions:  surprise, embarrassment, pity, exasperation.  Always, however, there is affection.  William has struggles, fears, doubts, and failings, but she does too, so “when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too?”  William is flawed, but so is Lucy.  He, like she, has been shaped by experiences over which he had no choice.

A major theme is our inability to really know another person.  Lucy tries to understand the behaviour of her mother, father, and mother-in-law but concludes “who ever really knows the experience of another.”  Though our ability to understand ourselves and others hopefully develops as we mature, in the end, “Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!  Except a tiny, tiny bit we do.  But we are all mythologies, mysterious.  We are all mysteries . . . This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.”

I loved the style of the book which reads like a spontaneous conversation with a friend.  I felt like I had sat down with Lucy for a catch-up chat.  The conversation touches on subjects and emotions that will strike a chord with people.  I certainly recognized myself.  The book inspires readers to consider their own relationships and to perhaps be more forgiving of themselves and others. 

This is definitely a book to read . . . and re-read.  Though it may seem simple, it has great depth that may not be fully appreciated without at least a second reading.

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

Review of NORTHERN SPY by Flynn Berry

 3 Stars 

This book was a disappointment.

Tessa Daly, a young divorcee and mother of a young son, works as a news producer for BBC News Belfast.  She discovers that her sister Marian is a member of the IRA after her involvement in an armed robbery.  Wanting her son to grow up in a safe Ireland, Tessa agrees to help her sister who convinces her that she is in fact working to achieve peace.  Tessa’s involvement brings her into contact with dangerous militants and into taking part in actions that are morally compromising. 

Much of the focus is on Tessa’s internal conflict:  what should she do?  Since her priority is the welfare of her son Finn, she asks herself, “would a good mother take Finn away from this place, or keep him close to his father?  Would a good mother work for peace, or stay away from the conflict?  Would a good mother be preoccupied with terrorism during every minute she has spent with her son this week?”  Her notions of right and wrong, her bond with her sister, and her loyalty are tested.  She becomes more and more disoriented as she struggles with what to do to protect her sister and her son and to help create a peaceful Ireland. 

I had several issues with this book.  One is the setting.  Tessa, the narrator, begins by stating, “My sister and I were born near the end of the Troubles.  We were children in 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed” yet the Ireland she describes is very much pre-GFA.  Not all issues in Northern Ireland have been solved, but the novel exaggerates the state of violence; the political climate and extensive sectarian violence the author describes are more appropriate to pre-1998. 

Another problem is that the conflict is over-simplified.  In the opening pages, Tessa says, “The basic argument of the Troubles hadn’t been resolved:  most Catholics still wanted a united Ireland, most Protestants wanted to remain part of the UK.”  There is no real effort to capture the complexities of the conflict.  It didn’t surprise me to learn that the author is not Irish but an American whose understanding of the situation is superficial. 

There are many improbable events.  Cameras capture Marian’s face before she puts on her mask prior to a robbery.  This is the behaviour of an experienced IRA member?  Once Marian is identified as an IRA member, her family would be under police surveillance, so having the IRA try to recruit Tessa makes no sense whatsoever.  Marian is known to police but she still manages to keep meeting her sister in public locations?  And don’t get me started on the novel’s conclusion:  there are just so many holes in the resolution.  The IRA wouldn’t know the identity of Tessa’s ex-husband who shares custody of Finn?  The author certainly has little understanding of how police and intelligence operate certain programs. 

It seems that Flynn Berry wants to portray the realities of life in Northern Ireland and the difficult choices faced by those living there, but she is disrespectful and does a disservice by both simplifying the conflict and exaggerating the violence.  I should not be surprised that the novel was chosen by the Reese Witherspoon book club; like many of the book selections, there is a lot of hype and much less substance.     

Review of OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS by Claire Fuller

 4 Stars

Having recently read and enjoyed Claire Fuller’s latest novel, Unsettled Ground, I decided to read her debut book which received much acclaim.

The novel begins in 1985 in London; 17-year-old Peggy Hillcoat is home with her mother Ute and her younger brother Oskar after having spent the last 9 years with her father in a remote cabin in Germany. 

As she tries to reintegrate into modern life, flashbacks take the reader back to 1976 when Peggy is 8 years old.  Her father James, a survivalist, kidnaps his daughter and takes her to live in Die Hütte.  Shortly after their arrival, he tells her, “’The rest of the world has gone’” so she believes that she and her father are the only people alive.  The two have a difficult life, subsisting on squirrels, roots, and berries. Much of the book’s interest lies in how they manage to survive and how Peggy finds her way back to London without her father.

There are several interesting characters.  James seems to be an immature man who is easily influenced by others.  He acts impulsively.  Though he makes lists, he is really not sufficiently prepared for life off-grid.  He has an obsessive personality; for instance he becomes so pre-occupied with building a piano that summer and autumn days are wasted:  “We should have been gathering and storing food and wood for the winter and, too late, we discovered that music could not sustain us.”  He is moody; Peggy is attuned to his mood changes:  “I sat on the bed, chewing my nails, worrying about how my father was too happy and how long it would be until his happiness left.”  As the years pass, James mind obviously deteriorates.

Ute is absent from Peggy’s life for nine years, but in fact she is absent much sooner.  Ute is a concert pianist, and she largely abdicates her role as mother.  She seems to care more about her career than her daughter’s well-being.  She goes on a concert tour, apparently without saying goodbye to her daughter, and leaves her in her father’s care even though she has reservations about his survivalist activities.  She doesn’t even call to check up on James and Peggy.  It is noteworthy that, despite being a German pianist, Ute doesn’t teach her daughter how to play the piano or to speak German, so Peggy can’t even speak to her grandmother. 

Peggy is the narrator, but it becomes clear that she may be an unreliable one.  She mentions that she has been diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome which is characterized by memory loss, confabulation, and hallucinations.  Emotions which she cannot process, she projects onto her doll Phyllis:  “At odd times I would remember with a jolt that Ute was dead, and Phyllis and I would crawl into the tent to cuddle until she stopped crying.”  She is subject to vivid dreams:  “I dreamed of two people frozen to death in their single bed, locked together in the shape of a double S.  When the spring sunshine crept under the door, the bodies defrosted and melted.  An unknown man came upon the cabin, hacking his way in with an axe through the stems of a thorny rose which bound the door shut.  I saw his hand, rough and hairy, reach out to pull back the sleeping bags, revealing faceless pulp, like the slippery guts of fish.”  Peggy also has a habit of bargaining to help her cope:  “If I drink this milk, Papa will say it’s time to go home” and “I told myself that if I caught the insect, Ute would not be dead and soon we would turn around and start going home” and “If I rocked for long enough, when I opened [my eyes] I would be able to stand and walk back through the trees into the clearing and hear the regular beat of the axe as my father chopped the wood.” 

There are some improbabilities that are problematic.  In nine years, Peggy and James encounter no one else:  “I had no idea this wind-worn woman, creased and bag-eyed, standing outside her barn with her cow on a rope, would be the last person I would meet from the real world for another nine years”?  Yet someone built a cabin which, though dilapidated, has a stove and basic furniture?  James’ lie that the world has been destroyed is never shattered by evidence like a plane?  Though Peggy does not speak German, wouldn’t she recognize the language from hearing her mother and grandmother speak it?

Reading this book is like constructing a complex jigsaw puzzle.  If attention is paid to details, the ending is not a surprise but a confirmation of the psychological damage caused by trauma.  I enjoyed the book and am quickly becoming a fan of Claire Fuller.

 

Review of STRANGE FLOWERS by Donal Ryan

 4 Stars

In this novel, a man tells his son that “there was more to the blind man’s story.  More than we’re told in the Gospel of John.”  What Donal Ryan has done is to take another Biblical story, that of the prodigal son, and retell it, to show what happened after the return. 

In the early 1970s, Moll Gladney leaves her family home in rural Tipperary without explanation.  Her parents Kit and Paddy pray for her return, and their prayers are answered five years later when Moll reappears.  She remains tight-lipped as to why she left, but a black Englishman, Alexander Elmwood, arrives shortly afterwards, claiming to be her husband and the father of their infant son Joshua who is described as a “strange flower” because of his “perfect, unblemished whiteness.”

The book explores what happens when strange flowers appear in an environment where differences are viewed with suspicion.  Joshua is not the only strange flower.  Alex, by virtue of his colour, doesn’t fit into the rural Irish village, but there are others who don’t conform to the expectations of society and the Catholic Church in an insular village.  More than one character tries escaping the confines of the village because of feelings of not properly belonging.    

Because he is so foreign, Alex experiences racism.  When he first arrives, people stare and he “expected sometimes that people would begin to throw coins at him, as though he were a street performer, or a beggar, some kind of exotic mendicant.”  Jokes are made at his expense and he is called “Kunta Kinte.”  Josh also experiences prejudice; walking home, his path is blocked by young men on horseback who then proceed to discuss his colour as if he weren’t present:  “Well, he doesn’t look one bit black.  Except for his hair and lips, maybe a tiny bit.”

Classism is also examined.  Paddy and Kit are always servile to the members of the wealthy Jackman family.  Paddy is dependent on them for work, and the house in which they live is on Jackman land. Andrew Jackman, the son, once tells Paddy, “You’re a servant, Paddy, that’s all you are, you’re not much more than a beggar man, and my mother and father could fuck you off our land any time they wanted.”  Paddy “understood in that moment what it was to be a herded animal, to be barked at and rounded on, to be sheepish, to be cowed.” 

The novel exposes life in a small village where gossip runs rampant.  When Moll disappears, people think “that Moll Gladney was either pregnant or dead, and it was hard to know which one of those was worse.”  When she returns, there is much speculation as to why she had left, “all sorts of theories swirled about, fables and yarns and tall tales and fairy stories and lascivious conjecture.”  When Alex enters their lives, he is constantly aware “of the whispered conjecture, of the jokes he knew were being made at his expense, and at the expense of Moll and Paddy and Kit and Joshua.” 

I love some of the characters in the novel.  Paddy and Kit emerge as heroic.  They are a quiet, ordinary couple but with so much dignity.  They have a strong faith and are honest and hard-working.  What is most emphasized is their capacity for love and forgiveness. 

In fact, the book can also be seen as a study of love of all types.  Paddy and Kit love Moll despite how she hurt them and her flaws.  Alex is so deeply in love with Moll that Kit thinks of it as “the reverent way he loved her.  Never loud in his love, or showy, but quiet, nervous almost, like he was afraid he was in a dream and if he wasn’t careful he could accidentally wake himself.”   To be with her, he moves where he has no one, “no comrade, no family, no Jamaican café, no Sunday school or backroom church, no street of his own people.”  He is also motivated by his love for his son, believing that his son would not be accepted were he raised by his black grandparents.  Paddy and Kit welcome Alex into their lives and grow to love him.  In the way he thinks about his father, Josh’s love is obvious.  Other types of love are also presented. 

Ryan’s style may not appeal to everyone, but I love immersing myself in his lengthy, lyrical, run-on sentences.  His descriptions of the landscape are stunning.  A paragraph that stands out for me is Alex’s meditation on the Irish landscape:  “the greenness of the place.  Everywhere greenness, trees heavy with it, hedgerows dappled light and dark and every shade of it, rolling fields of grass and green hills as far as his eye could see, and a lake below them in a silver line and, at the far side of it, below the blue and white and grey horizon, more greenness, more grassy hills and forests.  Streams of flowers dazzling through the green along the roadsides and the lanes.  Branches drooped with berries reaching out from hedgerows, everything looming and buzzing and dripping with life.  Even the rain had a shimmer of green to it.”

I did not always enjoy Josh’s rewriting of the blind man’s story.  The embedded narrative just didn’t work for me because it impeded the flow of the story, though I understand it serves as a parallel to Josh’s life.  There are actually many Biblical references which a person, with more knowledge of the Bible than I, could spend quite some time analyzing.  Certainly the chapter titles which are titles of books in the Bible are significant.

This, like other Donal Ryan novels I have read, is highly recommended and deserves not just to be read but to be re-read. 

Review of ONE LAST TIME by Helga Flatland

 4.5 Stars

Though the author is apparently very well-known in Norway, this is the first time I’ve encountered her writing.  This novel is of such exceptional quality that Helga Flatland deserves recognition in more than just her home country.

One Last Time examines the complexities of family relationships.  Anne, who lives alone since placing her husband in a nursing home because she can no longer provide the care he needs, is diagnosed with terminal cancer.  When she tells her son Magnus and her daughter Sigrid about her diagnosis, a range of emotions surfaces.  Sigrid in particular has had a difficult relationship with her mother, and the announcement of her mother’s impending death has her feeling fearful and guilty as she also wishes for some resolution, specifically some acknowledgement and apology from Anne for “the mistakes she made while raising Magnus and me.”

The narrative alternates between Anne and Sigrid; both provide first-person perspectives.  Sometimes the point of view changes in the middle of a conversation.  The obvious advantage of this narrative structure is that the reader sees both sides, two versions of events.  A difficulty with style is the run-on sentences; these can sometimes be confusing though they are clearly intended to suggest, like stream-of-consciousness, the continuous flow of thoughts.

What is outstanding is the characterization.  All characters emerge as fully developed, realistic people for whom the reader will feel sympathy but with whom he/she will also feel angry and frustrated.  Anne, for instance, is a strong woman who cared for her husband Gustav for years, but she paid perhaps too little attention to her children.  Sigrid thinks she had a terrible childhood because she felt abandoned by her mother who devoted herself to Gustav:  “my upbringing had harmed me, my parents’ abandonment had damaged me . . . I had more significant spiritual wounds than anybody would expect.”  One can certainly empathize with her abandonment issues, but Sigrid is also self-centred and self-pitying and is drawn to a person who accepted her narrative and “granted me long-awaited validation of my explanations and experiences.”

Seeing how Sigrid’s childhood shaped her is interesting.  Because of her mother’s distant parenting, Sigrid has become a helicopter parent, especially with her daughter Mia.  She resents Mia’s building a relationship with Jens, Mia’s father, who abandoned Sigrid and his daughter almost two decades earlier.  As a physician, Sigrid has difficulty maintaining a professional distance from patients.

Anne and Sigrid’s fraught relationship is built on decades of misunderstandings and resentments, so a nice, tidy final resolution would be unrealistic.  The two do take some tentative steps towards each other, but it is impossible to expect that years of things left unsaid can be fully expressed.  Habits established over years – ending discussions in silence or deferring “to defensiveness and thereafter to attack” – are difficult to break.  The ending, therefore, is perfect.  It is sad yet hopeful and very authentic.

The novel certainly resonated with me because last year I lost my mother to cancer.  I can identify with the devastation of a terminal cancer diagnosis and the emotions of guilt and fear experienced by Sigrid and her desire to be there to help as she also wants to escape at the same time.  The book is so grounded in reality that every reader will find something that will resonate.

There is wisdom that will remain with me:  one person’s “version of events [is] just as true and important as my own” and “it was ultimately meaningless who was right.  Neither of us was right” and “It’s not like [memories] represent the truth of things.”

Though light on plot, this book has great depth:  its characters are flawed and genuine, and its emotional realism is breath-taking.  One Last Time will not be my last time reading Helga Flatland.

Note:  I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.