Enchanted Prose

Poetry in Art and Prose (Pennsylvania, Toronto, upstate New York, European cities; 1854 to 1921): I loved everything about this beautiful book that encourages us not to lose sight of our gifts.

“I’m a viewer captivated by a painted voice,” says Molly Peacock who spent ten-years studying and rediscovering a pioneering 19^th century female American-Canadian artist she felt connected to. Flower Diary: In Which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door is gorgeously written, illustrated, and groundbreaking as no one has written a biography on Mary Hiester Reid – MHR as she signed her work.

“We don’t always need words to convey the vitality of a life. An image can do the work,” Molly Peacock says and proves. Although MHR left behind 300 still life paintings of flowers (“objects and emotions”) and later landscapes when the women’s suffrage movement emerged, she essentially left no written diaries. Which is why she was warned against writing the book.

Over 400 pages, Peacock demonstrates she’s not afraid of creative challenges and found plenty to write about. “Why try only one thing?” she asks on her artistically pleasing website. True to her words, she also answers by describing herself as a poet (see https://poets.org/poet/molly-peacock for her poetry collections, books, leadership), art biographer, memoirist, “art activist” (co-founder of Poetry in Motion on NYC subways and buses), “student of creativity,” and “word person.”

True to her words, her new female artist biography (follows Paper Garden: An Artist Begins her Life’s Work at 72) is not just one thing. It immerses our literary, visual, creative, emotional, and feminist senses.

You may never have heard of MHR but when Peacock calls her “a foremother of Georgia O’Keefe” she gets our attention. As does her marvelous poetic voice.

To give you a sense of the art infused in the book, below are three color reproductions. Printed on thick glossy paper, the Canadian publisher known for not publishing just one thing is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

True to her words, Molly Peacock segues from the main narrative to sharing parallels in her life with an artist from the past in sections titled Interludes. Printed on green-colored pages, brief as they may be (one to three pages) they move us. Most reflect on the story of her long love and marriage to “famed James Joyce Scholar” Michael Groden, distinguished university professor emeritus at Western University Canada who devoted forty years of scholarship to the Irish novelist. In dedicating the book to him we know how their love story sadly ends as he passed away in 2021 after a forty-year battle with melanoma (!), the same year this book came out. The inscription doesn’t spoil the Interludes. Instead, poignantly elevates the empathy theme.

Genre-wise, Flower Diary also encompasses art history spanning the Aesthetic movement, Impressionism, and the Arts and Crafts movement. As art criticism, Peacock’s descriptions of Mary’s flowers as “sensuous billowing roses,” “negligee-soft” petals, “the ache of tones,” “dreamy, psychological flowers” that are “constrained and free” open our eyes to an art form that conveys more than we may have thought. Against dark backgrounds, the shades or tones of the pink, yellow, and orange flowers jump off the page as the light catches them. The book also documents the importance of fellowship and friendships with other women artists when a culture prescribes how they should live their lives. How art connects, not just then but now. Aesthetically, MHR’s style is referred to as both Tonalism, “an approach that takes its impulses from music, or tones,” and Empathism as it “rarely fails to express the full range of emotions.” Collectively, a multi-layered reading experience to get lost in. 

Fascinating are the connections between a 19^th century female artist and a 21^st century one. MHR was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, studied art in Philadelphia, made Toronto, Ontario, Canada her home, and summered in upstate New York with trailblazing artists like the legendary designer Candace Wheeler. Award-winning Peacock was born in upstate New York (Buffalo), lived in NYC and elsewhere in the US, and also made her home in Toronto, Canada. “I paced her ground.”

Another connection: author and subject are both childless. MHR not by choice, the author by choice.

However, the quality and depth of love between their two marriages is starkly different other than both spouses lifted up their wife’s art. For very different reasons.

George A. Reid was Mary’s art teacher, so she knew he’d overshadow her which he did. He became a leading Canadian painter of realistic Canadian society (economic, social, rural life), and highly influential in the establishment of Canada’s art museums. Perennially preoccupied, insensitive, and emotionally unfaithful, whereas Michael Groden is seen as wonderfully attentive, comforting, and loving. “Love is a medium, like air (like paint itself), a full, caring environment for body and for spirit,” the author who experienced that joy exclaims.

What kind of marriage did MHR have? A complicated, enigmatic one. Orphaned at a young age with her sister becoming a nun in Spain, she was “revolutionary” when she struck out on her own in Victorian society and in a marriage of two painters in which George didn’t restrict Mary’s art. He married her because of it. “Simply by painting, she affirmed what he knew was his essential self.” He a “paradoxical combination of gruff and gregarious”; she “a combination of somber and amused.” Together, a “shared core of ambition and artistry.” He left his mark loudly; she “quietly” with “gentle fortitude.”

Mary was George’s model for some of his paintings. There’s a disturbing one in the book where he paints her holding an infant. Unable to bear a child, Peacock explores whether she felt stigmatized like the era did? What about their physicality? Married thirty-six years, was it ever sensuous like their art? Below (not included in the book) George paints a lighter touch and appreciation for Mary:

While we can’t begin to imagine how Peacock finished the book while Michael Groden’s life was nearing the end, at one low point she looks to her subject’s “inner strength” to lift her up. “Internal stamina that must connect to a conviction that something inside of you will perish if you don’t protect your gift.”

How and when do you know what your purpose in life is? That you have a special gift that you must protect or you will perish? 

If you’re still wondering why we should care about MHR, this Canadian broadcast contributes to answering that:

MHR and Peacock also love to travel. Mary going to greater lengths to do so, “crossing oceans five times,” finding inspiration and escape in Paris, London, Madrid, and Venice. Creativity and belongingness is also cultivated in the Catskill Mountains of New York where Mary found kinship and George a new calling: architecture.

Intriguing is Mary’s painting some of the vessels she strategically arranged her flowers in with Asian motifs, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints. “The Japanese word ukiyo conveys the notion of the fleeting nature of life.” An iconic floating one is The Great Wave by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, who influenced James Whistler (also Van Gogh) who influenced MHR.

Mary also painted the interior of her homes, where she managed to carve out a space for her studio evoking Virginia Woolf’s a woman-needs-a-space-of-her-own. “Almost impossible-to-balance” as she juggled many roles. She too, not just one thing.

Lorraine

The price of freedom linked to two historical eras and two real mysteries (New York City and San Francisco, 1922/23 and 1945): How does a WWII missing-in-action (MIA) story connect to the Jazz Age?

One era is associated with sacrifice, courage, and the fog of war; the other glitz and glamour. One defended democratic freedom; the other roared for individual freedoms. One somber; the other decadent. Yet both dangerous and plotted with secrets the reader comes to see are entangled. 

In The Pilot’s Daughter, Meredith Jaeger’s third historical novel (https://meredithjaegerauthor.com/the-dressmakers-dowry/, https://meredithjaegerauthor.com/features/boardwalk-summer/), she deftly engages by mixing two fictional historical periods and storylines. One set during WWII on the West and East Coasts, whereas the Jazz Age story could only be set in New York City. “Other cities tried to imitate New York, but none of them could capture the effect of jazz interpreted in light, a mile of streetlamps illuminating the car-choked streets around Broadway.”

Two women’s voices tell this entwined tale: Ellie Morgan, twenty-four-year-old daughter of an Army pilot who’s gone missing for six weeks in the vicinity of the coast of Italy and the Adriatic Sea when the novel opens, and her Aunt Iris, who’s been like a mother to her.

“Hope – a dangerous, slippery thing” characterizes Ellie’s pursuit of what happened to her dad, accompanied by her mother Clara’s sister. Clara is incapacitated – doped up and laid-out in bed. The two were never close, as she seems unable to say a kind word to her only child, thus her bond with Iris, who’s childless, and her dad.

The reason for stepping back to a glitzier timeframe arises when 1945 Ellie opens a package containing her father’s belongings. It arrived soon after the dreaded telegram military families live in fear of. Imagine being shocked again when she finds a cache of love letters stuffed in the pocket of his Army jacket, sent to him that he saved. They’re not from her mother or Ellie. They’re from another woman named Lillian who mentions a girl named Lucy, presumably her daughter. There’s an address: Greenwich Village, NYC. Despite the pain of what a grief-stricken daughter has just pieced together – that her beloved father had an affair and she may have a sister she didn’t know she had – in the crisis of the moment all she cares about is locating Lillian hoping she has information about her dad’s whereabouts.

Lillian’s backstory dates to the Ziegfeld Follies. If you know NYC, then you know the street Lillian and Lucy live on – Bleecker. A markedly different street when the Prohibition ignited speakeasies, gangsters, and mobsters and the greatest show on Broadway: a singing and dancing sensation that lasted over twenty years.

A 1921 clipping from The Philadelphia Inquirer serves as the preface. It sets the theme of unresolved mysteries. This one involves the murder of a Follies chorus girl nicknamed the Broadway Butterfly. No spoilers fictionally except to say that Aunt Iris knows something about those days she’s kept secret, which means Ellie has no idea she’ll be dredging up some painful history. The murder of Dot King was never resolved.

Moreover, the MIA fiction dramatizes the real story of over 73,000 WWII veterans still unaccounted for. Ellie’s father flew a B-24 Liberator bomber. The last one built for the war, the Tulsamerican, is the subject of a PBS NOVA special, which the author refers us to in her enlightening notes, on searching for and bringing home the remains of 1st Lieutenant Eugene Ford whose plane went down more than seventy years ago.

How many years does a family search for a loved one? When do they give up? At this early stage of Ellie’s father’s disappearance, she isn’t willing to accept the Army’s conclusion, believing he could be injured somewhere or a prisoner of war. Will she find him? Alive? Or, gain some measure of closure? 

Jaeger characterizes Ellie’s grief as “a pain that no one else understood. There are no rituals. No burials. No memorials and no closure.” A psychological term for this kind of enduring grief, also referred to in Jaeger’s notes, is “ambiguous loss.” Coined in the 1970s by Professor Pauline Boss, in the short video below she also describes this phenomenon as “frozen grief.” A concept that’s both a physical loss like Ellie’s MIA dad, or an emotional absence like her mother’s. A therapeutic diagnosis that’s wide-ranging, therefore relatable and poignant when there’s so much loss surrounding us today.

The reason this blog reviews a lot of historical fiction, beyond learning something new and inspiring, is that it’s often accompanied by compelling prose informed by terrific research. With all that’s at stake, Jaeger delivers old-fashioned, nostalgic prose using words that fit the times like “for heaven’s sake,” “swell,” and “hullabaloo,” offsetting the heaviness of the costs of fighting for freedoms.

Not all is swell either with how women were treated in the 1920s and 1940s. Ellie is a secretary for the San Francisco Chronicle, yet she wants to be a journalist, someone taken seriously. The way newspapers treated women was vastly different during wartime when “women around the country were taking on men’s jobs to aid the war effort and proving how capable they were.”

Aunt Iris brings us right back to jazzy times when women were treated as “tramps.” When she tells Ellie, “Don’t ever dim your shine,” this isn’t just foreshadowing advice but based on past experience. Aside from the necessities of war, men during both historical eras felt women “weren’t supposed to have opinions.”

Not all of them, though. Again, the author shows us both sides, this time through romantic storylines. One involves Ellie’s fiancé, Tom, an Army sergeant stationed at Fort Winfield Scott near the Golden Gate Bridge. They’ve only known each six months, and she’s lonely. So we see what she doesn’t want to: that his conventional, suffocating attitudes and values brought up by an old-school, high society Atlanta family who prioritize appearances clashes with a headstrong young lady after truths and with career aspirations. Will she wake up to how wrong he is for her? On the other hand, she reaches out to a “legman” (a reporter who stays out of the newspaper office to track down scoops) who encourages her and is empathetic. She hasn’t met Jack Miller but his charm shines through the phone, which deflects from two otherwise tense tales.

Do not assume Ellie is a bold young woman. When she and Iris leave San Francisco by train for New York City, she’s way outside her comfort zone but she pushes herself. In doing so, she sends us a pointed message of finding the courage to stand up for the things that really matter.

“Losing my own father as a teenager shaped who I am, just as it shapes Ellie,” writes Jaeger. Compassion and empathy for her female characters who’ve also lost so much shines through her inviting prose.

Wishing readers everywhere the best during this uncertain holiday season. One thing that is a certainty is that when you find the right book for the moon you’re in, reading brings joy, solace, and inspiration.

Lorraine

Traitor or Heroine? Deciphering an 80-year-old British WWII secret (Boston, London, Paris; 1928-1941 and present-day): Put on your thinking caps! Play detective and investigative reporter in this twists and turns WWII mystery uncovered by a fictional journalist, who makes the case for why we can’t get enough of well-researched WWII fiction with terrific prose.

Katherine Reay, who’s written seven other novels, isn’t new at this, but her new did-she-do-it WWII story offers new historical information apparently released in 1998. Still, we don’t know what was left out, and/or what might have been covered up, either cryptically, codified, or altered in some other way. This, then, is a complex novel for figuring out whether history was right or wrong when two intrepid, personally invested characters are determined to find out the truth. With names sometimes kept the same through three generations, codes used, genealogy to keep straight, and a lot of history tracked, The London House engages mystery lovers, historical or otherwise.

Pay attention to clues found in the novel’s significant epistolary format woven throughout: letters, diaries, archival notes, and war telegrams that feel voyeuristic and authentic. The narrative parts between the two main characters from Boston – Caroline Waite Payne and Mat Hammond – help to guide us.

A fictional article Mat has written for The Atlantic magazine drives the plot. He’s ready to hit the button to send it to his editor. He still has some time before his deadline although limited, so you’ll feel the pressure as the hunt gets closer to it. A fine, ethical journalist, he knows his article would be even better if an ancestor would preview it, provide comments, and sign off on it. The obstacle is the Waite and Payne families avoided digging into the story believing the truth was too painful, so they dwelled on the shame of it: that one of the daughters, a twin, of the original descendants of nobility was a traitor, so her death delivered justice. 

Mat believes there’s more to the story, that his article may not have all of it. We see how that plays out. The family member he reaches out to he had a close relationship with six years ago in college. Her grandmother Margaret was the twin sister of the woman at the center of the mystery – Caroline Amelia Waite born in 1918. Fast forward to the present-day, to third generation, twenty-eight-year-old ex-friend also named Caroline – Payne. She sensed her grandmother’s sadness but never knew why. She’ll find that out after Mat convinces her to get involved, but not until nearly the end.

His Atlantic piece proposes history can be wrong. That’s the intellectual part. The emotional part is found in the affecting prose, in complicated relationships. Past ones include the changing relationship between the twin sisters and an entangled love story. Present ones are between 1) Caroline and Mat, seen in romantic tension, 2) Caroline and her British father, adamantly against anyone unearthing this story after all these years, 3) Caroline and her older brother (married with a child also named Caroline), who doesn’t want her to do anything to upset their father surviving cancer, and 4) her divorced mother living in The London House. All these relationships are put to the test, all fraught when the story begins.

At sixteen, Caroline Waite left America for London. She lived at the family’s countryside mansion in Derbyshire named Parkley, then moved into the London House, which holds memories of fear and betrayal – “the hollowness of utter defeat.” Present-day Caroline was told her great-aunt was a victim of polio, which wasn’t true. On page 10 of this 350-page book (so not much of a spoiler), Mat tells Caroline the great-aunt she didn’t know was a secretary in Winston Churchill’s WWII secret intelligence operations SOE (Special Operations Executive), then supposedly fled with her “Nazi lover.” The other side of the story is what-if she was a British spy and something went wrong?

The female spy network has been the subject of other historical novels (see https://enchantedprose.com/code-name-helene/) and nonfiction books, but they were about known spies. Reay keeps us guessing whether Caroline Waite was or wasn’t. Listen to a real Churchill SOE agent who could be speaking for Caroline Waite – or not.

A great opening quote by Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician who broke the German Enigma code that ended WWII, is the first hint that “sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

One of my favorite parts is what Mat’s written. Aimed at confirming or correcting the past, it feels, pointedly, for us, for today and our future. Here’s an excerpt:

“In a time that necessitates reaching for the past to understand our present and navigate our futures with greater intention, there is a call to memorialize our shining moments, our sacrifices, our heroes. As we grapple with the aftermath of a world pandemic, tumultuous elections, social upheaval, the rise of sectarian interests, intolerance, and financial insecurity across the globe, we find ourselves examining the past to find the firm footing our present fails to provide . . . Contrary to popular ethos, I have found greater growth and understanding come from our failures. It is the fallen who reveal to us our humanity, our perseverance, our yearning for right, our resilience, and our determination to stand after stumbling . . .”

Around 100 pages in, you’ll realize Mat is right: he does not have the whole story. The Waite family accepted their daughter’s death but her body was never found.

A different type of tragedy befell Caroline Payne’s family when her younger sister, interestingly named Amelia, died two years ago. She grew up feeling she deserved her parents’ emotional abandonment, blaming herself for her sister’s death. Her self-perception that she can never be good enough may be flawed but it’s believable.

Caro’s (nickname) story begins in a 1941 Prologue in Paris when she’s working at the “ninety-eight-room mansion” of the House of Schiaparelli – the legendary, flamboyant fashion designer inspired by Surrealism – fitting her bold, daring personality.

Caro’s close friend and colleague, Martine, is fleeing the “too dangerous” 1941 city but she believes “Schiap keeps me safe.” Bringing Paris’ haute culture into the story adds charm and heady times before Germany invaded France. Focusing on the designer outspoken about Germany’s fascism and yet the only reason her showroom wasn’t shut down was she catered to wealthy Germans – versus her rival Coco Chanel believed to be a Nazi spy – exposes conflicting wartime ideologies, attitudes, and hypocrisy, real and necessary to stay alive.

Caro’s precarious situation quickly switches to the now, when Caroline receives a call from Mat. Immediately, she recalls his “electric smile” and his determination and brilliance that were “challenging,” accompanied by a vague feeling of “longing.” His persistence and energy challenges her once again, and us, when he tells her that his story, “your story,” can “provide a sense of hope.” He goes on to say that history can “assure us that when bad things happen, life continues, and that we humans are resilient and endure. Hope emerges from tragedy.” That “how we deal with pain and adversity remains relevant no matter how long ago it happened.”

Is this why we can’t get enough of WWII fiction? Arriving before the holidays after nearly two years of hopelessness, history is a gift.

Lorraine

How the sorrows of a white Afrikaner family reflect pre- and post-Apartheid (Pretoria, South Africa; 1986-2016): “Why is there not one normal person” in this novel? A question – adapted from the epigraph in which an odd woman ironically asks of film director Federico Fellini’s movies – you might ask of the characters in The Promise, the 2021 winner of the Booker Prize. Because Damon Galgut’s brilliantly conceived historical novel (his ninth; two earlier ones nominated for the prize) is hard-hitting and unusually written.

A different, yet related question frames the premise of the novel: “How did it become so complicated?” Galgut answers by tracking thirty years of a chaotic, conflicted white Afrikaner family, with its own share of odd (and prejudiced) characters, against the backdrop of a country’s turbulent history.

The most palpable and haunting injustice is racist based. A promise was asked by Rachel Swart on her deathbed at forty when the novel opens. Her demanding, insensitive, unfaithful husband Manie promised he’d keep it, but doesn’t since it involves a black woman – the long-time maid who helped raise all three of their children and care for dying Rachel. 

Manie owns lands and a farm near Pretoria, South Africa (where Galgut is from), drives a Mercedes, and co-owns a reptile park (“always obsessed with the cold-hearted sort”), exemplifying white privilege. Land ownership is one of the legacies of Apartheid the democratic government has yet to rectify. Its significance in the Swart family’s story reflects that.

The title implies hope. Had the promise been kept it would have been a hopeful sign in a changing country. Unmet, it sets the hopelessness tone of a family that’s lost its way. Traced in four, long chapters named for Ma and Pa and two of their three children, revisited roughly every ten years: 1986 before the end of sanctioned racism, 1995 when Nelson Mandela became the first President, through 2004 and 2016 chapters.

The death of former white Afrikaner president FW de Klerk while I was reading the novel, a man who’d been for and then against apartheid policies (not as forcefully as the world hoped), intensifies the reality of the family’s story, echoing the intensity of the promise of democracy. “One of the most emotional and political transitions of our time,” remarked Princeton Lyman when US Ambassador to South Africa.

Described as a “spiritual pageant,” Mandela, wearing a “green Springbok jersey,” awards the Rugby World Cup to Francois Pienaar to a cheering, grateful crowd, showing a grateful nation in 1995 when Apartheid ended. Sports a meaningful way to break down tribal barriers. The reference is the most upbeat The Promise gets.

Instead of uplifting, what you’ll get is brutal honesty. Wasted potential. Lost opportunities. The importance of the church. Death. Racism and tribalism. Complexities and legacies seen through a complex family and a country’s complex history.

The novel defies expectations. The word tribe is frequently used. Expecting the novel to pit white against black, which it especially does in the unfulfilled promise, it also pits white against white, religiously and ethnically. The “pain and struggle” of one family invokes the country’s long history of pain and struggle.

The narrative style alone, unlike any other I’ve read, stands out. Shifting from 1^st person to 3^rd and the least common 2^nd voice, alternating viewpoints aren’t separated by chapter nor punctuated; they shift within the same chapter’s sentences and paragraphs. The effect is altering Time, one of the themes. The prose sometimes feels dream-like/hallucinatory and stream-of-consciousness as narrators revert to the past, present, and future almost in one big breathe, amidst a country trying to forget its past and remake its future.

Contemptuous of the Swart family and extended relatives, the tone often sarcastic starting with the surname. Swart is an archaic word that means dark-skinned. The exception to this, in this reviewer’s opinion, is the way we view the youngest child, Amor, whom we meet at thirteen and already an outsider. The only person she’s affectionate with is Salome, the black maid; the only one who cares about fulfilling the promise.

Amor and Salome are the only two characters I liked. Amor because we empathize with her loneliness and trauma and she’s kind. Salome is the devoted one. Middle sister Astrid treats Amor condescendingly: “She was always thick with the underclasses.” Amor is also the only one who heard the promise asked and made, but no one believes her or chooses to disregard her.

Like the title, we would have been clued into Amor’s importance had the US edition kept the original UK cover.

The picture of a young girl with penetrating, sad eyes would have focused our attention on her from the get-go. She’s also the only person in the immediate family that doesn’t get her own chapter. Lucky for her, actually. 

Family “claws” dug deep into Amor’s soul, the reason she “never learns to live properly.” Astrid is the one who overlives. Anton, the “prodigal son,” the “golden boy,” struggles between underliving and overliving. He’s nineteen when the novel begins, conscripted into the army, a policy that ended when Apartheid did.

For a novel structured chronologically through three decades, pages, sentences, words, and thoughts blend past, present, and future. Each sibling chooses a path in reaction to the past and/or present. “Time has played on all our faces.” Playing with time doesn’t let us forget how it was and could have been. Anton wants the most; Amor believes “to move forward its best not to look back.” When forced to, she recalls, “Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.” Her overbearing aunt, Manie’s prejudiced sister, Tannie Marina, who appears on page one (her follower husband, Uncle Ockie also dislikeable) agrees: “We’re not going backwards now” on honoring the promise. Ironically, keeping the promise would signal moving forward.

Anton’s white girlfriend thinks “the problem with the country . . . is that some people just can’t get let go of the past.” The plight of the homeless, another character, shows “time passes differently for the homeless.” “For those shut out of the world.”

Multi-layered, the novel feels much longer than 269 pages. I don’t pretend to understand the country’s history of a “wretched struggle to survive” like Anton says about himself, but references googled give a sense of how much is packed in.

Two centuries ago, South Africa’s constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, so this is a diversely religious country. Rachel apparently left Judaism to worship in Manie’s church, the Dutch Reformed Church, second largest in this predominately Christian country. Converting back to her Jewish roots so she can be buried in the Jewish tradition is carried out but not without resentment and discrimination by Tannia: “Why couldn’t my brother marry into his own tribe?” Followed in the next sentence by, “I made a mistake, he said, and you pay for your own mistakes,” switching narrators.

Other than Jewish genealogists, how many of us know the history of Jewish migration to South Africa? The vast majority are Orthodox (unlike the US), including Rachel. Religious conflicts are seen as tribal. Rachel’s story is a great example of that.

The larger and best-known white tribal conflicts are between Afrikaners who speak with a Dutch accent as distinguished by English-speakers. Language differences are also rooted in complex historical legacies.

Arriving at a time when democracies are being seriously challenged, the theme of keeping promises is a valuable lesson. Even when the truth is hard to swallow.

Lorraine

What comes next after heartbreak (Rochester, Minnesota; present-day with backstories): Tracey Garvis Graves writes with a big heart. Heard it in a Love Song treats you to two “caring, salt-of-the-earth” hearts.

To get into the life-at-a-crossroads mood of the novel, listen to the lyrics of this Fleetwood Mac song, Landslide, the author cites as inspiration for her ninth novel in a Dear Letter addressed to readers of advanced copies. Note the words sung in the video below ask the central question/theme of the novel: “Can I sail through the changing ocean tides, can I handle the seasons of my life?”

(For a playlist of all 28 songs referred to in the novel, see here.)

The two hearts: One, the protagonist’s. Thirty-five-year-old music teacher Layla, fresh from a difficult divorce after ten years of marriage (papers pending). She’s the primary character asking the fundamental-to-the-romance plot question. That’s not to say the second heart isn’t struggling with the same question after his twenty-year marriage ended (he too waiting for the paperwork to make the break official). Josh Summers, slightly older than Layla, is an electrician who doesn’t have as much time to dwell on how to move forward socially as he’s a devoted dad sharing custody of his precious daughter, Sasha, a kindergartner in Layla’s music class. Layla is also the teacher who greets the students and their parents when they drop off and pick up their children, meaning she sees Josh often.

Recognizing there’s a chemistry between you and one of your student’s parents is tricky. Not as much, though, as entering into a new relationship after a divorce because: a) you’re not ready, b) you’ve been burned, and c) you don’t trust yourself, so you’re cautious and not sure you can tell the difference between genuine emotions from rebound ones.

Layla is the one who gave up her guitar/singing dreams of becoming a “rock goddess” in a band for a man whose values didn’t mesh with hers. Josh was the one happy in his marriage until two people married-too-young outgrew one another.

One reason Graves’ characters touch us as much as they do is they’re quite relatable. Relationships and emotions hit a nerve, regardless of whether you’re divorced, thinking about it, unhappy in your marriage or other type of relationship, or you’re single. Like wanting another chance at the brass ring. Like accepting ourselves, and stop blaming ourselves when relationships go wrong. Like closing ourselves off when they do. Most of all, not compromising the important things you want in life, after figuring out just what they are.

Music and journaling therapy are key to helping Layla recover and discover herself. The pandemic has shown us that having or cultivating “creative outlets” for coping, escaping, healing, and feeling good about ourselves are therapeutic. Graves may not be a songwriter, but uses her creativity to compose lyrics that sound like the music she loves.

Dogs as companions also soothe. Assistive-therapy dogs bring joy and can be life-savers. Dog adoptions surged during the pandemic. The cuddly addition of a “giant, white fluffy” senior dog named Norton, who can’t-stand-to-be-alone, is part of this picture. Josh adopts him for Sasha, providing more opportunities for Layla and Josh to get to know each other when she volunteers to watch him when Josh can’t.

Feel-good novels are Graves’ hallmark, presented with realistic challenges along the way. Feel-good is in limited quantity these days, depending on your outlook and circumstances. So, like author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s testimonial on the novel’s cover, “I cannot get enough of Tracey Garvis Graves.” Enough of her warmth, kindness, and romantic prose – darn good at crafting “flirty.” After reading and reviewing her last novel published in 2019 (a prolific author, writing nine novels in about nine years) The Girl He Used to Know, and inhaling On the Island (published a year before this blog was launched), you learn the author has a gift for tugging heartstrings.

This romantic story is told simply and easily, without the frilly prose. Don’t be fooled, though, because the emotions and issues raised aren’t simple or easy at all.

How many times have you told a friend, “I will be fine,” when it’s not true? When does compromising in a marriage (partnership, relationship) get out of balance? Are you unhappy in your marriage, but don’t “have the energy to rock the boat”? Afraid of being on your own financially? Perhaps currently without a job, so you don’t have insurance in case of an emergency – the plight of millions and Josh’s soon-to-be-ex. Do you feel like you’ve failed if your marriage did, so now you “second-guess every decision”? Are you dealing with custody issues, so there will always be a bond with your ex, an obstacle to fully letting go? Or, for whatever reason you find yourself single, do you feel like an outsider amongst your friends? Disheartened you may never find your soulmate, having tried or won’t use a dating app (as happens in the novel), as it’s too risky and who believes what anyone says about themselves online these days?

Ideally, you’ll meet someone naturally. In this romantic set-up, at your child’s school.

Layla and Josh have chosen professions that aren’t fancy, elitist, high-paying jobs. Making lots of money isn’t what drives some of us. Nor appreciate the yo-yoing worrying about your partner spending like crazy, like Layla’s ex did.

Elementary school teachers aren’t well-paid, particularly compared to their critical value in a child’s formative years. Josh didn’t go to college since he loves using his hands and solving wiring problems that can save homes from bursting in flames (as happens in the novel early on.) His friends also chose non-academic careers. Maybe like the reader, someone in your family, or circle of friends. Josh’s world is the working, middle-class our country has forgotten for too long.

The narrative style of this novel differs from others Graves has written in terms of alternating timeframes. Instead of separating Present and Past by chapters, the Now and Then are integrated within a chapter in several pages of italicized flashbacks. The flashbacks smoothly transition from something expressed in the Now that reminds Layla and Josh of their past.

Initially, I wanted more of Now than Then, but as the story develops the flashbacks offer an interesting perspective for understanding what happened in two marriages that didn’t work out. Given 50% of all marriages end in divorce, it’s a worthy literary technique for providing a vehicle for people to see and reflect on past errors of judgment or other mistakes made hoping not to repeat them again.

The prose strikes the right note, even when the anger of youth seen in the flashbacks is sometimes profane. Used in context and not overwhelming, it’s washed over by the rest.

Romance aside, Layla also has a dear friend, Tonya, who teaches at the same school and consistently watches her back. Another, Annie, she’s come to know well having taught all three of her rambunctious boys. The three have fun and show friendships can make all the difference too.

Freewill, apt title, is a song that “always stuck with Josh,” the words “simplistically yet profoundly true.” Precisely the way this pleasing novel comes across.

Lorraine