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In 1974 Vivien Fenton aims her rifle sight at her husband’s head and shoots. Thirty years later Vivvie, as she is known, gets a call from the Orlando police department to let her know that her estranged daughter, Kate, is in the hospital. The police officer tells her they believe that her daughter had taken an overdose. Kate’s two daughters, eight year old Averlee and six year old Quincy, are at the police department and they are hoping for a family member to take temporary custody of the children; children that Vivvie hasn’t seen for six years. Vivvie phones her other daughter Elin, who lives in Oregon, and leaves messages on her answering machine looking for her help. Elin having received a call from Kate the previous night in what sounded like a drunken state assumes that her mother has also received a call from Kate. “Elin...cared about her little sister on some level, surely she did, surely they’d been close before their father died, if only by the logic of circumstances-all’s well until tragedy strikes! But it wasn’t as if she possessed a cache of ‘better times’ memories as proof that she and her sister had once gotten along.” Elin decides to drive to Orlando to be with her mother after Vivvie finally talks to Elin on the phone. Elin is glad of the excuse to get away from her home as she has recently discovered her boyfriend is having an affair. Elin drives across country toward a future that will re-connect with the past and change the present forever. Deborah Reed has written a likeable family drama that though lacking any genuine surprises either in its ending or in its characterization, many a reader will come away with feeling they have not wasted their time. The author has a good ear for dialogue and each character is easily distinguishable by their speech, a talent that many modern writers seem unable to grasp. The dialogue is kept to a minimum and for most of the novel very little of that dialogue is superfluous. Though the novel is competently written there are times when analogies, metaphors and similes are clichéd, tired or rather absurd; “It took several days on the road for her headache to completely dissolve. But in its place a groggy weight, like a sloshy bladder of wine behind her eyes...” It concerns me that a writer who holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing and teaches at UCLA’s Extension Writing Program would write the following line; “All these years later he still felt like Frankenstein, half monster, half man, now sitting in a clamouring crowd.” I’m sure I don’t have to point out the glaring error in this line. Deborah Reed is a good solid writer who has written an enjoyable and workman-like novel but it fails to ignite any passion in the reader. You will find yourself liking the novel as you read through its 260 pages but the characters and the story will not linger in the mind for any great length of time. It is a novel that falls into that modern category of ‘good beach read’ if for no other reason that the memories of this novel will be washed away as quickly as sandcastles by the returning tide on your particular beach.Read full review
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