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Amazon.co.uk Review
None of Cath's feelings can be easily predicted by the reader, but all of them ring true. She finds her grandmother's diary and begins to fill in the stories that Georgia had hinted at over the years. What Cath discovers in her grandmother's journal is a secret that has lost its power to shock; and that very wearing-away of taboo adds to the poignancy of Georgia's restricted life. Her story unfolds against a backdrop of Cath's more immediate griefs and concerns, and begins to recede as Cath's San Francisco life returns to claim her. Miller's prose appears effortless, but is like the gestures of a magician, that conceal how the trick is accomplished. The result is a sage, continually surprising novel about finding peace-of-mind in a combination of habit, love and self-determination. --Regina Marler, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Image, February 2002
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One must expect to read a story of Cath's thoughts: who she has been, her divorces, her children, her search for her own future -where does she feel to belong in the future; as well as her search for the essence of her grandmother, her and John's couple, what was behind the façade...
A word one of the reviews on the back cover uses: domestic. Yes, Sue Miller captures perfectly those 'domestic' emotions through clear sentences that flow like water.
She makes us go deep in Georgia's story, feelings and resentments that lay at the heart of her couple with John; then the reader resurfaces to the present.
One truly visualizes a life we could never imagine -the sanatorium, the perception of an independent woman in those days-.
I found it a profound book in that many sentences made me reflect on what it meant -or means indeed- to be a couple, how one copes with secrets, misunderstandings, deceit
Ultimately, it is all about loving.
Catherine is a twice divorced mother of three from California who inherits and moves temporarily into the Vermont cottage in which she lived with her grandparents during her teen years. Long interested in her grandparents' seemingly successful marriage, which contrasts sharply with her own marriages, Catherine embarks on some serious soul-searching as she tries to decide whether to stay permanently in Vermont and begin a new life. While she is there, she discovers her grandmother's diaries and learns that her grandmother, too, faced personal crises and challenges.
The let-it-all-hang-out confessions of the minutiae of Catherine's and Georgia's emotional lives seem, somehow, intrusive to me, too personal--not because they are so revelatory or shocking but because they are so mundane, so self-conscious. The reader is hard pressed to find many universal truths which can illuminate aspects of our own lives in these revelations, and I ended up learning more about the daily emotional lives of these women than I really wanted to know. Additionally, Georgia's diaries did not ring true to me. Dignity, restraint, and, most of all, privacy, are so integral to the character of lifelong residents of Down East Maine and Vermont, especially elderly ones, that while I could accept Georgia's behavior as real, I couldn't imagine anyone of her era putting it all in writing, and her supposed intention of having Catherine read the account some day seems too pat. In her treatment of "the world below," I wish Miller had cast a brighter light into the emotional murk to reveal more of the universal truth we all seek.
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