Recent Reviews
this is my daughter by Roxana Robinson
Though Roxanna Robinson’s book This is My Daughter is not as tightly constructed as her brilliant novel Cost, I believe Robinson is one of the most psychologically astute writers on the subject of family dynamics.
In this novel, Robinson explores the emotional fallout of divorce, especially on children. Emma Goodwin and Peter Chatfield live in the fast moving, well-to-do world of New York City. Their first marriages have ended and they begin to date. Though Emma and Peter seem to possess only superficial understandings of their prior marriages, Robinson provides her readers insight into their early lives and backgrounds.
Their relationship proceeds with ease except for the tension created by the interactions between their daughters. Emma’s daughter Tess is only 3, but Peter’s daughter Amanda is 8 and already troubled. Peter and Emma eventually marry and Amanda’s bossiness escalates to full bullying. Emma observes Amanda belittling Tess and finds it difficult to manage her feelings of resentment even though she knows she should. Emma’s own guilt about divorcing Tess’ father makes her vigilant in meeting Tess’ every need. Meanwhile, Peter is embarrassed and ashamed by his daughter’s behavior and yet requires her to spend summer after summer, holiday after holiday, with Emma and Tess. Peter cannot see his daughter for who she is: an angry, needy, traumatized child of divorce in need of thoughtful and mature parenting.
Roxana Robinson shares the inner thoughts of her characters as they reflect on this family predicament. With great empathy, Robinson conveys the emotional struggle within each of these characters. There is no simple solution for complex family dynamics, especially when the children just want life to return to the familiar pre-divorce routines.
The first two sections of the book could have been better edited, but the last third of the book crescendos to a compelling end, brought on by a crisis. Peter and Emma’s desperation to create a new family unit blinds them to the individual needs of their daughters. Their divorces leave a trail of emotional debris that they never say and never attempted to clean up. Amanda especially needs to be comforted and counseled. She needs love and support from Peter and Emma, not judgment and anger. Peter’s own narcissistic needs make him late to this acknowledgement, but he does arrive and actually begins to see his daughter with greater clarity. The good news is that Peter and Emma both reflect on their prior decisions and offer each other insight about their behaviors. It is not as if this family lives happily ever, but it feels that they will move forward with more understanding about themselves and each other. Really, what more can you ask for?
Unravelling by Elizabeth Graver
Elizabeth Graver’s 1977 novel, Unravelling, is intense, raw, sensual, and psychologically astute. Set in the 1820’s in rural New Hampshire, this book is one of the best coming-of-age stories I have read. Graver penetrates the complex inner lives of her characters and imbues them with words and deeds that impart insight and inspire empathy.
Aimee Slater, an older woman, narrates the novel. She tells a mesmerizing tale of how she came to live in a hunting shack on the edge of her parents’ property with limited family contact and minimal social interaction.
As a young girl Aimee lives and works on her family’s farm. Though her family experiences many hardships, Aimee’s relationship with her parents and siblings is positive. Aimee is perceptive, precocious, intuitive, and intelligent. But when she moves into adolescence and begins to have her own opinions, Aimee’s mother withholds her love and her father harshens his tone. Aimee begins to observe the various ways people navigate their feelings. She wonder about her mother’s relationship with her father, “What did she know of the man she lived with? Was he a gentle man with sudden, rare spinnings into rage, or an angry man who mostly held himself in check?”
Aimee and her brother Jeremiah are close in age and spend a lot of time together. As they begin adolescence, the siblings have a sexual encounter in the hayloft of their family’s barn. It is consensual, childlike, brief, and singular. Shame and embarrassment infiltrate their lives and they are never quite the same. In a different era, they might have gone to therapy or talked with a religious figure, but confusion corrodes their relationship. For relief, Aimee decides to leave the farm to work in the mills of Massachusetts. Without understanding Aimee’s motivations, her parents feel rejected and emotionally turn away.
Many tragedies befall Aimee and at age 17 she copes as best she can. She works hard in the mills and lives in a boarding house in Lowell. When she becomes pregnant, Aimee has no one but her family. Instead of sending love and support, her mother sends her a letter filled with judgment and wrath. The letter ends, “Do Not Come Home.” Rather than provide unconditional love, Aimee’s mother’s provincialism and religious superstitions determine her actions. After giving birth, Aimee returns to New Hampshire and does not lie or apologize. And like Hester Pryne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Aimee is shunned. Yet, as the decades pass, she creates her own little family with a disabled man from the town and a traumatized girl named Plumey. Reading about the unraveling of Aimee’s life haunts me. Yet Aimee’s accumulated insight and compassion over the years allow her to understand herself and attempt to reconcile with her elderly mother. As Aimee says of Plumey, “It is the deepest mystery what goes on inside anybody’s head.” Elizabeth Graver succeeds in delving into her characters’ heads and writing a novel filled with emotional and psychological nuance and poignancy.
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah’s enthralling novel The Nightingale explores the impact of the German occupation of France in WWII on the lives of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol. The book opens with Vianne, now an elderly woman living in Oregon, viewing artifacts from her life during WWII, a life that she never shared with her surgeon son because it would cause them both grief and despair.
Hannah then transports the reader to 1939 and the story of how each sister responded to the escalating tensions in France. Vianne, the older sister, struggles with her rambunctious, bold, and brash younger sister who suffers from grief over their mother’s death and the pain of their father’s abandonment. Hannah fully captures the complexity of the sisters’ relationship. As the Nazis begin their occupation of France each sister responds to the ensuing horror differently, but both heroically. Though Vianne believes her sister leaves their small village in the Loire Valley to pursue a love affair, Isabelle actually joins the Resistance and smuggles downed pilots from France over the Pyrenees into Spain. Isabelle’s code name is The Nightingale.
Vianne’s courage is just as compelling. While Vianne’s husband is off fighting the Germans in Russia, Vianne wrestles with the agonizing choice of whether to abandon the family farmhouse when the local Nazi commandant takes over a room in her home. She decides to stay in this sadistic situation. When the Jews in the village are being rounded up, her best friend Rachel begs Vianne to save her son Ari. Vianne does so at great risk and raises Ari as her own. Saving Ari gives Vianne the courage to participate in a clandestine effort to help other Jewish children escape extermination.
The novel depicts the methodical and incremental cruelty enacted by the Nazis in French towns. Jewish citizens are forced to accept one humiliating edict after another, each time hoping that that it will be the last. Initially, Jews are only able to stand in the food lines after all the non-Jews. Then they are prohibited from working certain jobs and, before long, all Jews in Vianne’s village have been rounded up and put on trains to the concentration camps. Though some villagers attempt to defend their Jewish neighbors, the Nazi’s brutality affects every person. It is a horror show.
The end of the novel is quite satisfying as Vianne does get her wish. I won’t reveal the specifics, but Vianne’s son finally learns about his mother’s prior life. She says, “I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste that it was.” Kristin Hannah's ambitious story explores family dynamics, the horrors of the Holocaust, the brutality of the Nazi occupation, the bravery of some people and the cowardice of others, the important and often-unacknowledged role of women in wartime, and the way extraordinary circumstances reveal a person’s moral character. As Vianne states at the end of the book, “If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”
