Janet Burroway

Received in ebook format from the publishers at Hopcyn Press in exchange for a review. Copies are available via Amazon here.

Dana, on the verge of leaving her senator husband of many years, instead stays and nurses him through his final illness. She's burying him in early September 2001, in up-state Pennsylvania, with the plumes of smoke billowing in the distance. Little does she realise that the day she buries her husband is that what grief and sorrow she may feel would be absorbed and unknowingly belittled by the collective national grief coming out of the World Trade Centre bombings.

She comes to terms that her husband has left little money (after debts, death duty etc)
and in her grief fixates on renovating some furniture that she finds in the garage before selling it all.

Feeling little - desiring something - she starts heading west, looking to find the younger self she seems to have lost during her marriage. In looking for the one home she remembers with any fondness - she finds it has been replaced by a mall. She looks up Cassius, one of the few people she remembers from school, and the two soon form a sexual relationship. Almost immediately she becomes aware of an undercurrent she's never had to be attuned to before - being white, she has never had to look through a black man's eyes before, to be wary of where she goes and who with, and certainly not as part of a mixed race couple.

Soon she is threatened by Cassius' family, and escapes to a previously agreed safety spot in Florida. It is here that the majority of the action in the book takes place, where the community is split - black vs white, young vs old, and somehow, without realising it, Dana gets stuck in the middle.

When the book starts out Dana is very numb, and the writing style reflects this - I was worried that it would continue this way through the rest of the book, but it becomes easier as Dana spends more time with Solly, Tanya, Bernedette etc and begins to find herself. The language does remain rather sparse - there's few unnecessary words e.g. we really dont know that much about Phoebe outside of the occasional phone call. Dana's early life - her mother running out on her and her father, Dana planning to leave her husband - makes her a wanderer, desperate to move on, and the finale of the book finds Dana making a decision to commit to what she has and actually stay still for a while - it's not necessarily what she had planned for herself but it's something worth committing to, and not just for herself.

Neither race comes of better or worse than the other - all Whites aren't racist bigots and all Blacks aren't the Nobel Savage. In the end people are people and Dana needs to both find herself and find her position in relation to others whilst coming to terms with all the losses in her life....

So a sparsely worded book that tackles grief, racism, small town living, human against nature, human against human, secrets and lies. The sparseness of the words worked, but am yet to be convinced it's my favourite writing style.… (mehr)