Maw Books

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The Widow’s Season by Laura Brodie has a great first line, “Sarah McConnell’s husband had been dead three months when she saw him in the grocery store.  He was standing at the end of the seasonal aisle, contemplating a display of plastic pumpkins, when, for one brief moment, he lifted his head and looked into her eyes.”

Did he fake his death?  It could be possible.  After all, he died in a freak flash flood and his body was never found.  Was it his way out of their marriage?  Or is she simply going crazy and imagining all of their encounters and conversations.  Has her grief become so consuming that she no longer can tell reality from vision?

I was so anxious to get to the end of this book.  No, not for it to be over. This is a haunting beautiful book.  It could easily be called a ghost story but it’s so much more than a simple ghost story.  It’s a story of marriage, of grief, of love, resolution, discontentment, starting over, loyalty, and the questioning of one’s sanity and reality.

I was anxious to get to the end of this book because Brodie perfectly convinced me, just like Sarah, that one can not be so sure about the realities they are experiencing.  Was Sarah’s husband David really dead or was he really alive?  As a reader, I honestly no longer knew.  I wanted to believe that yes, he was really dead – a figment of Sarah’s imagination.  But then the next chapter Brodie would easily convince me that he was really alive. A great depth and complexity of the characters and their relationships with each other.  I love character driven novels and this one certainly is that.

I remember reading the ending of the book sitting on the couch with my husband, closing the book and then saying, “Ah!  I can’t believe this book! “  And that was in a total good way.

I loved the widow’s support group that Sarah attended:

She had almost come to accept David’s appearances as a sign of mental breakdown, a delusion sparked by her isolation.  But here were these women insisting that she wasn’t crazy, she was normal.  Somehow the idea didn’t soothe her; a touch of insanity was preferable to the status quo.
She glanced over at Margaret, who was leaning against the kitchen doorway.  “What do you think?”

Margaret hesitated, apparently choosing her words more carefully than usual.

“I think it’s going to be hard for you to have any closure until David’s body is found.”"

“Which means you think this is all in my head?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you don’t believe in ghosts?”

Again Margaret hesitated.

“I believe there is a lot more going on in this world than we can comprehend.  Whether or not that includes ghosts, I don’t know.  But I’ll say this much – if you are really seeing David, there must be a reason.  Either he is somehow trying to reach you, or you are trying to reach him.  Most likely the latter.  There’s probably something unresolved in your mind.”

I really liked The Widow’s Season.  Feels like the perfect book for the fall.  I’d highly suggest reading this one curled up on the couch with a quilt on hand.  And if you’re like me you won’t be able to put it down.  I read the second-half of the book in one sitting.

Links of interest: Laura Brodie website, more book blogger reviews,
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Berkley Trade.  June 2, 2009.
Paperback, 320 pages. ISBN 0425227650
Copy source: Review copy sent from the author
The Widow’s Season is available from your favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s, and Amazon.

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