Review by Booklist Review
In a powerful evocation of loss and yearning, McCorkle (Life After Life, 2013) spools a story around two actual, horrific 1940s events: the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston and a train derailment in North Carolina. It's 2017 now and Lil and Frank, in their late eighties, have been married for over 60 years. Each lost a parent in one of these tragedies, wounds that altered their lives. With masterful skill, McCorkle weaves among time periods and points of view, including those of Lil, Frank, and Shelley, who is trying to keep her precarious life on track, and her youngest, fearful, six-year-old son, Harvey. Shelley now rents the home Frank and his mother moved to after the death of his father, the place he wants to see before he dies. McCorkle offers a poignant meditation on the timeless question: is there existence beyond the grave? Her metaphors expand her reach beyond the simple clichés that our lives are a blink in time, and her tale dramatizes how attaining meaningful understanding has always been the true challenge between wife and husband, parent and child. McCorkle testifies to the ageless nobility of human beings who want the next generation to do better. A deeply moving and insightful triumph.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The engrossing latest from McCorkle (Life After Life) meditates on the physical and emotional imprints that make up a life. Octogenarian couple Frank and Lil retire to Southern Pines, N. C., from the Boston area to be closer to their adult daughter, Becca, and for Frank, a retired professor who has been drifting with no sense of purpose, to explore his past. Frank had lived there during his youth, after a 1943 train accident injured his mother and killed his father. Lil spends her time sorting through and composing journal entries to leave for her children, and through Lil's voice, McCorkle finds an elegant mix of wistfulness and appreciation for life ("The premature blue dusk of a winter afternoon... the kind of light that makes you feel immortal"). Meanwhile, Frank walks the train tracks near the accident site and frequently drops by his former home. The house is now occupied by Shelley, a single mother who lives with her young son, Harvey, and guards herself against outsiders. Early on, McCorkle makes clear that Shelley is hiding secrets in the house, and as Frank persists in his desire to tour the house, Shelly's family's betrayals and falsehoods bubble to the surface. Throughout, McCorkle weaves a powerful narrative web, with empathy for her characters and keen insight on their motivations. This is a gem. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Having bonded over losing a parent when each was a child, Lil and Frank married happily and, now retired, are sifting through memories in ways that can be troublesome. Lil starts revealing secrets, and Frank brings heartache to the single mother living in his old family home. With a 75,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
McCorkle returns to Southern Pines, North Carolina, to explore themes of fate, mortality, and the human need for coping rituals. Four characters take turns narrating what at first appears to be a rather aimless accretion of vignettes. On closer reading, however, the ingenious structure of this novel reveals itself. The present action begins on June 12, 2018, as Frank, a retired professor in his 80s, leaves what appears to be a suicide note and heads out in search of artifacts from his childhood. A single mother named Shelley is struggling to retain her court reporting job after the trial judge discovers that she's doing more than simply transcribing the trial of a prominent doctor accused of killing his young mistress. Shelley's younger son, Harvey, self-conscious about his repaired cleft palate, is worrying his mother and teachers with his fixation on serial killers and ghosts. Frank and his wife, Lil, recently moved to North Carolina from Newton, Massachusetts. Their reminiscences, conveyed by his interior reflection and her notebook entries, reveal the tragic coincidence that united them: In the early 1940s, each lost a parent to a disaster when Lil's mother died in a Boston nightclub fire and Frank's father perished in a North Carolina train wreck while returning from Florida with his wife. Frank's formerly idyllic childhood in Newton was doubly curtailed by his father's death and his mother's refusal to leave North Carolina. She married Preston, the tobacco farmer who rescued her from the wreck. The remainder of Frank's childhood was spent in Preston's house, near the tracks--the house that Shelley now occupies. Lil's notes, spanning decades, reveal Frank's infidelity and their eventual reconciliation. Death permeates this starkly honest tale, unleavened by McCorkle's usual humor. Frank is still obsessed with the funerary customs and afterlife mythology he once studied. Harvey is transfixed by morbidity. Shelley harbors conflicting sentiments about justifiable homicide. Lil rails against Frank's growing fatalism. Gathers layers like a snowball racing downhill before striking us in the heart with blunt, icy force. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
