- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Women's Press Ltd; READING CREASES, LIGHT EDGE CORNER WEAR, edition (Mar 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 070434744X
- ISBN-13: 978-0704347441
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 13.6 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 569,967 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
'Memorable characters... a complicated and remarkable bunch' Times Literary Supplement; 'This novel touches the quick of what we are and might yet be' The Times; 'Hay successfully explores, in spare poetic prose, the link between passionate love and the natural world' The List; 'A novel transformed through strong characterisation and dramatic evocation of landscape into an accomplished and satisfying narrative'New Internationalist
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Norma Joyce is young, dark and homely but tough as prairie grass; Lucinda is fair and dutiful, and stands between Norma and the bitter anger of their father. In the drought-ravaged prairies of 1930s Saskatchewan, two sisters fall in love with the same man in a saga of unrequited love.
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First Sentence
Some nights she still goes over every detail, beginning with the weather and proceeding to the drop of blood on the old sheet - her quick wish for a man with straight white teeth and red lips - and then his arrival. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Some nights she still goes over every detail, beginning with the weather and proceeding to the drop of blood on the old sheet - her quick wish for a man with straight white teeth and red lips - and then his arrival. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
1930s Saskatchewan......and the Hardy Family in their respective ways are living up to their name. Ernest, brooding and increasingly withdrawn from a world which has deprived him of his wife and two-year-old son, takes consolation in the routines and rituals required to extract a meagre existence from the harsh and unforgiving landscape. Lucinda, undemonstrative and unfailingly loyal, has accepted the inevitability of putting her own ambitions on hold while there are other, more pressing responsibilities to take on. Norma Joyce, many years younger and several degrees plainer than her sister, is constantly questioning, pushing, determined to carve out an identity for herself and make sense of her father's palpable dislike of her.
Into this maelstrom strolls Maurice Dove, charismatic, engaging and criminally careless with his affections. For most people, it seems obvious that he and the attractive Lucinda will be drawn towards each other. Norma Joyce however has a totally different agenda and is not accustomed to giving way to anyone.
From Saskatchewan to Ontario and back again, spanning a period of almost 40 years, Elizabeth Hay describes Norma Joyce's journey to self-discovery and eventual redemption. It is a journey filled with pain, loss and almost unbearable dignity in the face of the worst that life can throw at her and Ms Hay's touch is astonishing for someone writing a first novel. In these days of the bludgeon, it is an absolute joy to come across someone who can convey the most extreme of emotions as much through what is left unsaid as anything else. She has a sense of the innate cruelty of life which Anita Shreve would envy and she is capable of creating setpieces which leave the reader aching for some alternative outcome, even as she/he is forced to nod in acknowledgement that this is how things are in the real world. I defy anyone to read the passage describing Norma Joyce's final moments with Ernest without offering silent applause.
It is all too fashionable nowadays, the moment a novel is set in this sort of emotional and topographical territory, to start tossing around the names of Annie Proulx, Carol Shields, Alice Hoffman etc. No doubt it is too early to start burdening a burgeoning talent with such invidious comparisons and the responsibility for such a strong literary heritage. But make no mistake about it....Elizabeth Hay can write. She really can. If you read only one book this month, I urge you to try this one.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A fantastic book. An amazing journey with Norma Joyce through her life with its changing landscapes and weather. Hay manages to put the reader right into the head of Norma Joyce throughout the novel, and truely brings her to life. As much as I love Shipping News by E Annie Prolux, this rates even better.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Setting her story in the Saskatchewan Dust Bowl in the 1930s, where "children grew up never tasting an apple and thinking Ontario was heaven," Hay tells of Norma Joyce and her sister Lucinda, opposite in appearance and personality, who have little to keep their minds and hearts occupied on the flat prairie and on their farm, where they have only their stern and uncommunicative father for company. The sisters fixate on the homely details of their lives, beautifully and vividly described by Hay--strange, little Norma Joyce collecting (or stealing) bones, buttons, and small objects, which she displays in the unused room which once belonged to her mother, while shy, beautiful Lucinda cleans every corner of the house and concentrates on being the perfect housekeeper. Into this emotional void steps Maurice Dove, a handsome student of weather and fascinating story teller, who quickly becomes the focus of both sisters' attentions while he stays with them and studies the native grasses which have apparently protected their farm from the ravages of the wind and weather.
In the hands of a lesser writer, the story could have become a romantic pot-boiler, at this point, but Hay's insights into the differing thoughts and motivations of all the characters, all of them with faults, combined with her beautifully realized setting, her lovely, often quiet, descriptions of weather and nature in all seasons, and her use of common sights and objects as symbols make this an absorbing story of a woman's search for fulfillment. As Norma Joyce grows from a spunky 9-year-old, suffering from early puberty, to a woman in her mid-40s, moving from the farm to Ontario and New York and back, Hay shows how external social forces, combined with Norma Joyce's powerful memories of the farm and Maurice Dove, continually affect the choices she makes as an adult, even when she urgently attempts to free herself from these influences and take full control of her life.
Sometimes selfish to the point of cruelty in her desire to manipulate outcomes, Norma Joyce is not a typical "heroine," but Hay creates such believable contexts for her behavior that the reader will have no difficulty empathizing, if not, identifying, with her. This is an absorbing story of a woman's attempt to come to grips with her past--both the good and the bad--and to use it in forging a fulfilling life in the present.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Beautiful
It takes a great writer to recreate a world so well that you believe you are reading a true story. The depiction of rural life in cold, dusty, stormy Saskatchewan is beautifully... Read more
Published on 23 April 2008 by H. Lacroix
Canada at its best
If, like me, you're a big fan of Canadian literature, you'll love Elizabeth Hay. If you place Margaret Attwood on the highest plinth, with Robertson Davies and Alice Monroe... Read more
Published on 3 Oct 2004 by Cressyforever
Another 5-star review for this book (it's good!)
This is a fantastic novel by a writer I'd never previously heard of. Ernest Hardy unfairly blames his 3-year-old daughter Norma Joyce for the accidental death of his son (the exact... Read more
Published on 13 Feb 2004 by Dr. Kenneth W. Douglas
Seasons of discontent
It's an interesting experience to encounter a book in which none of the major figures is likeable. Yet that very circumstance is a tribute to Elizabeth Hay's eloquent portrayal of... Read more
Published on 16 Oct 2003 by Stephen A. Haines
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