Review by New York Times Review
ORPHANS have long been a boon to literature. Part of their appeal is pragmatic: they're good for plot (parents have such a pesky habit of squelching adventure). But they're also ideal exemplars of a certain universal experience, what the writer Francis Spufford has called "the situation of abandonment." In his memoir, "The Child That Books Built," he says this experience "focuses a self-pity that everyone wants to feel sometimes," and expresses "the solitude humans discover as we grow up no matter how well our kinship systems work." In other words, we're all orphans at one time or another, at least in our hearts. Gail Godwin's 14th novel, "Flora," offers a veritable taxonomy of orphans: from the conventional, both-parents-died variety to the quasi-orphan (one parent still nominally in the picture) to the elective orphan (a runaway) to the reverse-orphan (a parent unmoored by the loss of a child). In fact, as the story unfolds, we realize it's populated almost exclusively by orphans of different stripes. It's a mark of Godwin's light, sure touch that this doesn't feel contrived. On the contrary, it begins to feel natural, inevitable that beneath the surface of any individual we'll find a lonesome soul, cut adrift. Spiritually adrift, that is. "Flora" doesn't belong to the venerable orphan-as-wanderer tradition; its lineage can't be traced to Dickens or Dahl. In fact it's a doggedly stationary tale. Our protagonist is rooted firmly at home, waiting out a polio scare on a mountaintop in North Carolina. It's the summer of 1945. Helen Anstruther is 10. Her mother died of pneumonia when Helen was 3. Her beloved paternal grandmother has just died during the past spring, her heart giving out while she tried on an Easter hat. Helen's father still walks the earth - for what that's worth. He's ditched her for the summer, having gone off to do secret war work at Oak Ridge in Tennessee. Not that his presence is entirely missed. When home, he's generally burning the grilled cheese, getting sloshed on Jack Daniel's and making acerbic remarks. Flora, her mother's 22-year-old cousin, comes to be Helen's summertime companion. Having just completed a teacher training program, she takes rather too earnestly to her role as temporary guardian, toting sacks of flour and cornmeal, a tin cake box, an entire ham all the way from Alabama. "She was the first older person I felt superior to," Helen reflects. "This had its gratifying moments but also its worrisome side." Flora is a fullfledged orphan, abandoned in infancy by a "trashy" mother, then at age 15 losing her father when he was "shot between the eyes during a poker game." Godwin complicates the caregiver dynamic by making young Helen an officious despot ("Already I was learning how effectively she could be managed by a simple look of disdain," she confesses after Flora's been in the house less than an hour), while Flora flutters around full of deference and praise. Better yet, Godwin complicates this dynamic by revealing how "simple-hearted" Flora will always have a leg up on Helen. Literally: as a child, she shared a bed with Helen's mother, and loves to tell how she'd sleep with one leg flung over the bigger girl, "so she wouldn't abandon her." Helen's mother was yet another orphan, having lost her parents to the flu epidemic at age 8. Taken in by Flora's father, she became, Flora rhapsodizes, "a little mother to me." Ready for a few more orphans? There's Finn, the recently discharged soldier who delivers groceries to this female household on top of the hill; he was adopted by relatives. ("Did your parents die?" Helen asks. "No," he replies, "but they had five kids and no money, and my father's cousin and his wife had money but no kids.") There's also Rachel Huff, Helen's friend from fifth grade, whose father might be away doing war work - but might not actually exist. By summer's end, Rachel and her mother will have "vanished into thin air." There's even the little girl in the mystery program Helen and Flora listen to on the radio. She gets separated from her mother in a department store only to join the community of the mannequins. "In their world, they tell her, she can never get lost or feel abandoned again." And there's Helen's grandmother Nonie, the closest thing to a mother the girl has ever known, whose presence fills these pages even after her death. Helen conjures memories of her voice dispensing "soldierly counsel" and feels her spirit presiding throughout the old house, "which pulsed with her stories." Nonie too had been a kind of stray, an orphan-by-choice with fairy tale overtones, having fled at age 18 from "the farm and her greedy new stepmother and menacing stepbrother." When Helen receives a monogrammed suitcase for her birthday, her father sardonically suggests flight from home is her legacy. "Ah, now you're one of us," he proclaims. Then, lest she miss the point: "Now you can run away." Nonie's passing doesn't exactly summon any latent fatherly instincts. The day she dies, he delivers the news bluntly, "Mother is gone," then warns, "Don't ask me what we're going to do next because I don't know." And the evening after the funeral, before lurching upstairs with his drink: "I probably shouldn't say this, Helen, but I look forward to the day when you can spot the unsavory truths about human nature for yourself." What parenting! What orphaning! No wonder Helen feels "I had to fight to keep from losing the little I had been left with, including my sense of myself." And, given their mutual proximity in isolation, no wonder the primary person she fights with is Flora, whose unfitness as a sparring partner only stokes Helen's fury. For most of the book, not much happens in the house on the mountaintop. Helen fantasizes about what her father might say if he wrote her a letter or surprised her with a visit. In old age, she'll recall it as having been "for the most part a boring, exasperating summer" - by any reckoning, a risky proposition for a novel. But Godwin makes use of the older Helen's voice to dispense snatches of foreboding. We understand that we're creeping toward some calamity, whose unpredictable nature is precisely what keeps us reading. Remorse, we learn, is a word that will come to haunt the adult Helen. But she's graced by a more hopeful "re-" word, too: recovery. Before her birth, the house on the mountaintop served as a convalescent home for "tuberculars or inebriates, and occasional souls whose nerves weren't yet up to going back to ordinary life." Helen has grown up hearing Nonie's stories about these fragile, fragmented people, and she likes to imagine their lingering presence, to sense herself in their company as they read and play cards on the porches. "Sometimes," she fancies, "the Recoverers were there, the ones from her stories, discussing their rates of improvement as the sun passed over the house." 'Mother is gone,' the heroines father says. 'Don't ask me what we're going to do next because I don't know.' Leah Hager Cohen's new nonfiction book, "I Don't Know," will be published in the fall.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 26, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Godwin, celebrated for her literary finesse, presents a classic southern tale galvanic with decorous yet stabbing sarcasm and jolting tragedy. Helen, a writer, looks back to the fateful summer of 1945, when she was a precocious, motherless 10-year-old trying to make sense of a complicated and unjust world. Young Helen lives on a hill in North Carolina in an old, rambling, haunted house that was once a sanatorium for folks she calls the Recoverers. Raised by her immaculately turned-out, tart-tongued, and stoic grandmother, whom she worships, Helen is bereft after Nonie's sudden death. Worse yet, her father is summoned to work on the secret military project at Oak Ridge. He recruits a 22-year-old Alabaman cousin to stay in his place. Sweet, emotional, and seemingly guileless Flora is no match for feverishly imaginative, scheming, and condescending Helen. When a polio outbreak keeps them at home, and a war veteran begins delivering their groceries, tension builds. Godwin's under-your-skin characters are perfectly realized, and the held-breath plot is consummately choreographed. But the wonder of this incisive novel of the endless repercussions of loss and remorse at the dawn of the atomic age is how subtly Godwin laces it with exquisite insights into secret family traumas, unspoken sexuality, class and racial divides, and the fallout of war while unveiling the incubating mind of a future writer. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Godwin is always in demand, and with early accolades for this tour de force from the likes of John Irving, requests will multiply.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Narrator Helen Anstruther, "going on eleven," is the relentlessly charismatic and wry star of this stirring and wondrous novel from Godwin (Unfinished Desires). In the summer of 1945, in the mountains of North Carolina, Helen is trying to make sense of the world since her beloved grandmother's death. When her father leaves to do "secret work for World War II" in neighboring Tennessee, this becomes much more challenging, and Helen, motherless for years, is left in the care of 22-year-old Flora, a delicate and, Helen might say, hopelessly effusive relative. Helen has grown up in a rambling old house that once served as a home for convalescent tubercular or inebriate "Recoverers" under the care of Helen's physician grandfather. For a precocious girl who has lost everyone who's ever loved and known her, the house becomes a mesmerizing and steadfast companion. Though Flora initially appears to Helen as little more than a country bumpkin, their time together profoundly transforms them both. Godwin's thoughtful portrayal of their boredom, desires, and the eventual heartbreak of their summer underscores the impossible position of children, who are powerless against the world and yet inherit responsibility for its agonies. Agent: Moses Cardona, John Hawkins & Associates. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ten-year-old Helen is a precocious, imaginative child who must spend the summer with her guardian, Flora, while her father is in Oak Ridge, TN, during the last months of World War II. Helen is a "haunted little girl" who lost her mother at age three and whose grandmother, who raised her, has just died. She and her late mother's cousin, 22-year-old Flora, are isolated in Helen's family house on a mountaintop, quarantined from the polio that threatens their community. Helen is resentful of her caretaker, Flora, who cries easily and appears to Helen to be unsophisticated. But Flora is singled-minded in her attempts to do right by Helen. The aftermath of that formative summer will steer the course of Helen's life and haunt her forever. VERDICT A superbly crafted, stunning novel by three-time National Book Award award finalist Godwin (A Mother and Two Daughters), this is an unforgettable, heartbreaking tale of disappointment, love, and tragedy. Highly recommended.-Lisa Block, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Godwin (Unfinished Desires, 2009, etc.) examines the intricate bonds of family and the enduring scars inflicted by loss. In the summer of 1945, 10-year-old Helen Anstruther has just lost Nonie, the grandmother who raised her after her mother, Lisbeth, died when she was 3. Helen's father, the discontented, hard-drinking principal of the local high school in Mountain City, N.C., needs someone to stay with her while he does "more secret work for World War II" in Oak Ridge, Tenn. So he asks her mother's 22-year-old cousin, Flora, and, when one of Helen's best friends comes down with polio, insists that the pair remain at home to avoid the risk of infection. It's a bad idea: Weepy, unbuttoned Flora seems like a dumb hick to snobbish little Helen, who at first makes a thoroughly unappealing narrator. But as Godwin skillfully peels back layers of family history to suggest the secrets kept by both Nonie and Lisbeth (some are revealed; some are not), we see that Helen is mean because she's terrified. She's already lost her mother and grandmother, she's afraid her polio-stricken friend will die, and another close friend is about to move away--after delivering some home truths about how "you think you're better than other people." Helen got this trait from Nonie and both her parents, we realize, as Flora's comments gradually reveal how cruel Lisbeth was in her eagerness to leave behind her impoverished background. As usual with Godwin, the protagonists are surrounded by secondary characters just as fully and sensitively drawn, particularly Finn, the returned soldier whose attentions to Flora spark Helen's jealousy and prompt the novel's climax. Not all mistakes are reparable, we are reminded, but we learn what lessons we can and life goes on. Unsparing yet compassionate; a fine addition to Godwin's long list of first-rate fiction bringing 19th-century richness of detail and characterization to the ambiguities of modern life.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
