Monica Wood is the author of
four works of fiction, most recently Any Bitter Thing, which spent twenty-one
weeks on the American Booksellers Association extended best-seller list and was
named a Book Sense Top Ten pick. Her other fiction includes Ernie’s Ark
“Our story, like the
mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that
resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the
headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces
said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with
its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable
fact: Dad. Then he died.”
Monica Wood’s writing is simply luminous as she magically conjures
up a lost place and time — a small industrial Eastern town on the eve of the Kennedy assassination. The story of her father's sudden shattering death and her family's attempt to cope with the incomprehensible loss is brought
to vivid
life through her precise and poetic prose. Her skill at characterization is so
refined that I felt as though I really knew each of them personally: her no-nonsense little sister, Cathy; her solid, dependable big sister Anne; her forever-young handicapped sister Betty; her overwhelmed and anxious mother and heart-broken Catholic Priest uncle, "Father Bob;" her sometimes incomprehensible Lithuanian landlords the Norkuses and, of course, her beloved dad. Wood’s story begins the morning of her father’s death of sudden
cardiac arrest on the way to his job at the local paper mill. Told through the
perspective of her fourth-grade self we experience her shock as she struggles
to understand what the loss will mean for herself, her mother and her siblings.
Her poignant realization that anyone can be taken from us at any time is
painfully raw and moving. Through her eyes we watch her family's sometimes incomprehensible response to grief, her mother, a widow, standing
still and alone in a dark room, unable to return to her empty bed; her beloved uncle’s
hidden alcoholism and brief institutionalization. “We were an ordinary family;”
she writes, “a mill family, not the stuff of opera. And yet…my memory of that
day reverberates down the decades as something close to music. Emotion, sensation,
intuition. I see the day—or chips and bits, as if looking through a
kaleidoscope—but I also hear it, a faraway composition in the melodious
language of grief….” (p. 7) We watch as young Monica escapes her grief by
delving into the world of Little Women and Nancy Drew and attempts to write her
own novel poignantly titled The Mystery of the Missing Man. Here is a child
in love with words, who copies them over and over on the beautifully made paper
her father had brought home from the mill. Here is a child with the keen
observational skills of the gifted author she will become.
This is an excerpt from a review that first appeared in the Story Circle Journal and on the Story Circle Book Review Site. To read more visit: http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/reviews/kennedys.shtml
