Winter Book Reviews: 2 of 3

And is not time even as love is, undivided and faceless? But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, and let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.—Kahlil Gibran

Longing. The operative word for these three books.

DEAR EDWARD by Ann Napolitano 

The heartbreaking story of Edward Adler, who at twelve-years-old is the sole survivor of a commercial airline crash that kills 191 people, including his parents and older brother. Napolitano weaves the narrative of the characters on the doomed flight along with Edward’s “after the crash” life living with his aunt and uncle, befriending Shay, the girl next door, and the crash victims’ families and their letters to Edward. How does he make a life for himself on his terms with so many assuming he was spared death for a reason. A novel to study for the expert way the author moves the plot forward in so many subtle and wonderful ways.

Favorite line(s): “You get to choose a lot of what you do when you’re fifteen, Edward. You’re still only twelve. Because of what you’ve survived, you’re already more interesting than your brother. People want to talk to you, don’t they?”

This is true. Edward visits the principal’s office every Wednesday afternoon, and while he hoists an old blue watering can from one pot to the next, Principal Arundhi tells him the names and history of each plant. The short boy in his science lab told him, while they were dissecting frogs, that he wants to be an opera singer when he grows up. The school secretary, when he was submitting paperwork to the office, told him that she was born in Georgia and that she and her sister had fed two wild alligators every afternoon after school. “They liked Wonder Break best,” she said. The girl with the locker next to his told him that she has a six-year-old sister who has never spoken out loud.

Dr. Mike says, “They want to share something extraordinary about themselves, because you’ve experienced something extraordinary.”

Edward doesn’t say anything in reply, because he has no response. The doctor has told him something true. He will not waste time arguing the point.

WHENCE AND WHITHER: ON LIVES AND LIVING by Thomas Lynch

Lynch ponders the big questions, the existential mysteries in this, his fifth book of essays. “Is that all there is? Can it happen to me? Why is it cold? What comes next?” He writes at the height of personal exploration as a post-middle-aged man, lapsed Catholic non-believer, a recovering alcoholic, twice divorced, spiritual over-thinker who you’d love to pull a chair up next to and discuss it all—especially the tough questions. Named after his dead uncle, a priest, and following his father into the funeral home business, Lynch contemplates where he comes from and how he got to be the sum (son) of so many unanswered questions, so many unfinished lives. 

Favorite line(s): Possibly these are the miracles we fail to see, on the lookout as we are for signs and wonders: for seas that part for us to pass through, skies that open to a glimpse of heaven, the paralytic who stands and walks, the blind who begin to see, the shortfall that becomes a sudden abundance. Maybe what we miss are the ordinary miracles, the ones who have known us all along—the family and friends, the fellow pilgrims who show up, pitch in and do their parts to get us where we need to go, within earshot and arms’ reach of our healing, the earthbound, everyday miracle of forbearance and forgiveness, the help in dark times to light the way, the ones who turn up when there is trouble to save us from our hobbled, heart-wrecked selves.

OLIVE, AGAIN by Elizabeth Strout 

Olive is at it again. We first met her in Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winner, “Olive Kitteridge.” One of my favorite characters in all of fiction, Olive’s story picks up where the first novel-in-stories ended. Exasperating yet enduring, Olive, a widowed, retired school teacher from Crosby, Maine, marries Jack Kennison, a man she made fun of with Henry, her first husband before his death from a stroke. She befriends former students, questions the reasons for the cold relationship she has with her son, and wonders with another resident in the eldercare facility she moves to about mortality and getting older. In story after story, Strout captures the loneliness, class inequalities, and the disappointments in family, jobs, love, illnesses, and the general heartbreak of life. But “Olive, Again,” is not all doom and gloom. Olive doesn’t have “the disease to please,” and that makes for some hilarious bits of dialogue. You don’t need to read “Olive Kitteridge” or Strout’s other novels to appreciate “Olive, Again,” but it’s fun to recognize some of the characters from earlier works and see where they’ve ended up.

Favorite line(s): But it was almost over, after all, her life. It welled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee—All of it gone, or about to go.