Tag Archives: childlessness

Early Review: Wilderness

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Wilderness by Lance Weller (pub date 9/4/12)

I know that I keep saying how much I love novels that make me think.  And of course I enjoy books that are more for fun as well, but there is just something about a great literary novel that really gets me going.  I loves books in which the characters are the story, books that reflect timeless themes and show us something about human nature.

Wilderness is one of those books!  I first heard about it a month or two before BEA, and being a big fan of Bloomsbury, I made sure to snatch up a copy.  And I was blown away by this understated but powerful debut novel.

Set in 1899, Wilderness tells the story of Abel Truman, a Civil War veteran who fought for the Confederacy and lost the use of one arm.  Haunted by horrors he witnessed during the war, as well as by his own personal sins, Abel made his way to rural Washington State after the war ended.  He lives alone in a shack with only a dog for company, reflecting on the life that led him to his current condition.

When Abel is beaten by some roaming bandits, he is reminded that he cannot truly escape from the world.  The rest of the book crosscuts between Abel’s past and present.  He recalls being severely injured during the war and being nursed back to health by Hypatia, a runaway slave with her own sad past and who Abel figured would be the last person who would want to help him.  And in the present Abel meets Glenn and Ellen Makers, a biracial couple who face their own hardships for marrying outside their own race, and a Chinese orphan named Jane Dao-Ming.  These encounters, along with Abel’s backstory, show us both the good and evil in human nature.

Wilderness is an interesting title for this book.  What I anticipated to be a “man v. nature” story turned out to be something entirely different.  For me, the “wilderness” in this book was not the woods of Washington State, but the wilds of humanity.  The story is set during a rough time in American history, when people had very little and struggled to survive. Throughout his redemptive journey, Abel witnesses both the abject cruelty and selfless kindness that people bestow on each other.  It’s a haunting story that had me tearing up at the end.

If you are looking for a book with beautiful prose, great characters, and a meaningful story, I would definitely recommend Wilderness.  It’s an amazing debut novel, and one you won’t easily forget.

Early Review: The Light Between Oceans

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The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman (pub date 7/31/12)

“Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ‘em both, and then it’s too late.”

We’ve all bent the rules a little at some point in our lives.  Face it, who hasn’t ever taken a long lunch at work, embellished their resume a little, or kept the extra change we got back from the clerk at the grocery store?  Most of the time, no one notices these minor transgressions.  But what happens when our little lies get bigger and start hurting other people?

The main characters in The Light Between Oceans find themselves in that very situation.  They are the perpetrators of a lie told with the best of intentions that ends up causing more harm than good.  Tom and Isabel Sherbourne live on Janus Rock, a tiny island half a day’s journey off the western coast of Australia.  Tom, a World War I veteran, is the lighthouse keeper and his devoted wife Isabel dreams of starting a family.  But after multiple miscarriages, Isabel wonders if she will ever be a mother.

Then as if Heaven-sent, a boat washes up on their shore, containing a dead man and a living infant girl.  A stickler for the rules, Tom wants to report it immediately.  But Isabel has already fallen in love with the baby, and she tries to convince Tom that it would be kinder to keep her than to report the incident and send her to an orphanage.  Though against Tom’s better judgment, the couple keeps the baby and names her Lucy.

For a few years the little family thrives on Janus Rock.  But as Lucy grows, so do Tom’s guilt and Isabel’s denial about whether they did the right thing.  They soon make a discovery that shows them the consequences of their lie, and the aftermath threatens to tear them apart forever.

The Light Between Oceans is a beautifully tragic story.  It’s a real human drama about right and wrong and the difficulty we often face in telling the difference.  Tom believes in rules and order; he thinks that having rules is what makes people civilized.  But after seeing his wife in agony over not being able to have a child, he decides to break the rules out of love for her and the baby.  Isabel, on the other hand, completely denies any wrongdoing.  In her mind, she was destined to be Lucy’s mother and committed no sin in raising the child as her own.  Their actions leave the reader wondering “what would I do in this situation?”

This book reminded me of House of Sand and Fog, another story which blurs the line between right and wrong.  If you’re looking for a moving, dramatic story, I would highly recommend this novel