A page turner for sure and an absolute delight. I actually made myself sick staying up till 1 am trying to read one more chapter, one more page, until I couldn’t anymore…. And then woke up the next day and getting a horrible case of vertigo at 630 am, lying on my bed yelling out names of housemates who didn’t hear me, and then giving up, convinced I had finally gotten the ‘Rona. I didn’t. But I digress.
Loved the Catholicism woven in, not disrespectful, not dismissive, not conspicuous but not hidden either, it was just THERE, like furniture in some respects, but permeating the space like old fashioned perfume. Maybe because I’m Catholic and had once considered becoming a nun, maybe it’s because like Elna I do know that we have a calling to serve, to give. Maybe because in spite of being Catholic many of us lose our way and give ourselves to the wrong causes, often failing the ones closest to us.
Loved how this book kept bringing back questions on the house theme : when is a house just a house and not a home? What is home? Where is home? What is ephemeral, and what is eternal? How much of our identity is tied to memory, and how much of these things is about where we come from and where we’ve lived?
Loved how this book is populated with so many interesting, powerful female characters, and yet it’s not about feminism, but more about what and why and how women are, the good and the bad.
Loved loved loved the relationship between Maeve and Danny: what a tribute to sibling relationships, that I now want to give this to my kids to serve as inspiration, and to my brothers, because I love them. Despite their individual bouts of selfishness, they do teach each other a lot and were throughout wholly devoted to each other. Would that all children of divorce have the kind of support that these two had.
This story is about horrible mistakes, and about the passage of time, and forgiveness. Almost every character is lovable except perhaps Andrea, though at the end, you understand that some people are just more lost, and therefore perhaps more in need of love, than others. Elna with her saintly heart knew that. And while my hope that Cyril Conroy would somehow be redeemed by the end of the book didn’t happen, I did come to understand him as I got to know Danny, because despite himself he did grow up to be very much like his father. Perhaps they both tried to be good husbands and fathers, they just never managed to get on the same page as their wives. Neither couple seemed to have an understanding of what real communication and communion look like.
I love how this book tells us of the follies of women and men — we are all fallen creatures after all — there’s plenty of blame to go around. But there’s also the most beautiful parts of us when virtue is awakened and we laugh, we talk, we pardon, we love.
A couple of quibbles: while this story doesn’t glorify divorce, it does normalize it. I didn’t quite understand why Danny and Celeste divorced, there just didn’t seem to be enough grounds for one, but we’re supposed to accept it as just “something that happened”. Likewise, even though Elna’s abandonment of her children was the huge thing looming over their lives for most /all of the book, when they finally talked about it, she dismisses it with the words “you were fine”. While we could argue about how “fine” the Conroy kids turned out — after all, they didn’t become drug addicts or drunkards or murderers — the emotional damage, the long term effects (Danny’s insensitivity to his wife’s needs, Maeve’s lifelong cocooning and seeming inability to have intimate relationships beyond those she already had) aren’t exactly inconsequential either.
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