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More Than You Know , by Beth Gutcheon
Highly recommended!
With the wisdom of age, Hannah looks back to her seventeenth summer, spent in Dundee, Maine, her family's ancestral home. The anguished events of Hannah's summer--chafing under the suspicious, dissatisfied eye of her stepmother, taking chances to be with Conary Crocker, the town's charming bad boy--become entangled with events from Dundee's past. In particular, Hannah finds herself drawn to the puzzling story of Claris Osgood, a distant member of her family tree whose long-ago, ill-fated marriage to Danial Haskell changed the shape of this New England community.
Gutcheon creates compelling, complex characters. As a mature narrator looking back to childhood, Hannah captures the emotional and sensual rollercoaster of adolescence. Hannah's story, and Claris's, capture the ways in which human relationships and individual character are forged, and sometimes twisted, by the pressures of family, history, personality, and circumstance. Their stories suggest the sustaining power of human relationships, but also the destructive potential that arises from our inability to sufficiently know one another--our tendency to interpret our beloved's actions and character through the lens of our own desires, needs, and disappointments. Gutcheon also depicts a seaside community whose inhabitants are more than small-town eccentrics, and whose structure and landscape are as subject to transformation as the lives of its residents.
Gutcheon also incorporates a menacing, supernatural presence into this community drama. (Or is there more than one such presence?) Although the ghostly appearances are portrayed effectively, the reader is never sure of how the supernatural functions in Hannah's world. Though the ambiguity is intentional (Gutcheon has discussed this element in an interview), for me the ambiguity was too great. The ghost's presence was so inscrutable as to seem arbitrary, even muddled.
Through the life stories of two compelling women characters, a rich cast of supporting characters, and a menacing, supernatural presence, Gutcheon opens our eyes to the ongoing but often unrecognized transformations of individual character, local community, and regional geography that keep us from fully knowing ourselves, one another, and the places that we call home.
Highly recommended!
With the wisdom of age, Hannah looks back to her seventeenth summer, spent in Dundee, Maine, her family's ancestral home. The anguished events of Hannah's summer--chafing under the suspicious, dissatisfied eye of her stepmother, taking chances to be with Conary Crocker, the town's charming bad boy--become entangled with events from Dundee's past. In particular, Hannah finds herself drawn to the puzzling story of Claris Osgood, a distant member of her family tree whose long-ago, ill-fated marriage to Danial Haskell changed the shape of this New England community.
Gutcheon creates compelling, complex characters. As a mature narrator looking back to childhood, Hannah captures the emotional and sensual rollercoaster of adolescence. Hannah's story, and Claris's, capture the ways in which human relationships and individual character are forged, and sometimes twisted, by the pressures of family, history, personality, and circumstance. Their stories suggest the sustaining power of human relationships, but also the destructive potential that arises from our inability to sufficiently know one another--our tendency to interpret our beloved's actions and character through the lens of our own desires, needs, and disappointments. Gutcheon also depicts a seaside community whose inhabitants are more than small-town eccentrics, and whose structure and landscape are as subject to transformation as the lives of its residents.
Gutcheon also incorporates a menacing, supernatural presence into this community drama. (Or is there more than one such presence?) Although the ghostly appearances are portrayed effectively, the reader is never sure of how the supernatural functions in Hannah's world. Though the ambiguity is intentional (Gutcheon has discussed this element in an interview), for me the ambiguity was too great. The ghost's presence was so inscrutable as to seem arbitrary, even muddled.
Through the life stories of two compelling women characters, a rich cast of supporting characters, and a menacing, supernatural presence, Gutcheon opens our eyes to the ongoing but often unrecognized transformations of individual character, local community, and regional geography that keep us from fully knowing ourselves, one another, and the places that we call home.