Friday. Thank God.
I am at work.
I just have to get through the day and then I can sleep alllllll weekend.
Although honestly, I'm feeling sooo much better. But I'm pretty tired and my whole gut hurts from all the coughing. Walking from my car to the building wore me out.
And when I got here I found an email saying that one of our security guys had died yesterday morning. This man usually worked the main building lobby, which I passed every day on my way to the elevators, and he was the sweetest, nicest man in the universe. He had a cheery smile and a greeting for everyone who came through the door. I didn't know that he'd been battling cancer for a long time...I knew he'd been in the hospital last year but somehow thought he'd had back surgery or something. He didn't look sick.
This has made me quite sad. They've set up a fund at the credit union for in-lieu-of-flowers. I have a rebate check I was going to cash today, I think I'll just put it in there instead.
Book Review!
This is the first book of Holman's I've read, although her previous book, "The Dress Lodger," made some noise.
The story centers around the small town of Three Chimneys, Virginia and several of its citizens. Margaret Prickett, a recently divorced cheesemaker with a 13-year-old daughter, is struggling to keep her farm afloat but is drowning under debts left her by her predecessors and years of estate taxes. She has pinned all her hopes on presidential hopeful Adams Brooke and his promise of a bill including a one-time debt-forgiveness amnesty for small farmers, and has trained her laser-beam focus on getting him elected. Meanwhile, a local woman, Manda Frank, has given birth to a world-record eleven babies, putting the town on the global stage and uniting the community...until the babies begin dying.
August Vaughn, Margaret's loyal longtime farm worker and Thomas Jefferson impersonator, has pined for her his entire adult life while he still lives at home with his mother and father, the local pastor. Pastor Vaughn is riddled with guilt because he was the one who encouraged Manda to have her babies even while every doctor in the world advised a selective reduction...Pastor Vaughn worries that his motives were not pure, that he wanted the children not for Manda's sake or because it was right but because it would unite his community.
Polly, Margaret's teenaged daughter, is in love with her subversive history teacher Mr. March, whose proclamations are just dangerous enough to be seductive.
Once Brooke is elected President, Pastor Vaughn concocts the idea of reenacting the famous incident when President Jefferson was given a mammoth cheese, and Margaret is unwittingly swept up in the town's enthusiasm for this endeavor...even while she watches helplessly as Polly and August both slip away from her.
Holman's writing is...well, the word that springs to mind is "lyrical," but I'm not sure that's right. It isn't dense or florid but it edges at times into pretentious, although it is very readable and comprises some lovely imagery. Her characterizations are very strong. Margaret is prickly and at times unlikeable. She is obsessed with protecting Polly to the point that she forbids her innocent modern entertainments and makes all her food and clothing from scratch to avoid the horrors of preservatives and artificial colors. And yet Holman makes us see Margaret's side, and we find ourselves thinking how nice it'd be to live on her farm with its fresh-baked bread and home-canned tomatoes.
Polly is a complicated teenager, frightfully smart, who yearns for escape but also yearns for her mother's way of life. Her infatuation with her teacher is awfully familiar...haven't we all had that one teacher who seemed so revolutionary? And yet this man's seeming integrity and dedication to principle is a fraud, and we don't sense the full extent of it until very late in the story.
August is in many ways an enigma. A quiet, eminently capable man who chooses to subvert his own desires for the sake of others...his parents and Margaret, mostly...finds that he only gets what he's most desired when he strikes out and claims a life of his own. The relationship between him and Margaret, while central to the story, is quiet and restrained and quite in the background, and its eventual resolution is just as quiet.
The ending is, in some ways, a tad melodramatic given the homey understatedness of the rest of the story, but not so much as to be a deal-breaker.
I recommend the book. It isn't a terribly quick read but neither is it a doorstop. I did it in about a week.
I just have to get through the day and then I can sleep alllllll weekend.
Although honestly, I'm feeling sooo much better. But I'm pretty tired and my whole gut hurts from all the coughing. Walking from my car to the building wore me out.
And when I got here I found an email saying that one of our security guys had died yesterday morning. This man usually worked the main building lobby, which I passed every day on my way to the elevators, and he was the sweetest, nicest man in the universe. He had a cheery smile and a greeting for everyone who came through the door. I didn't know that he'd been battling cancer for a long time...I knew he'd been in the hospital last year but somehow thought he'd had back surgery or something. He didn't look sick.
This has made me quite sad. They've set up a fund at the credit union for in-lieu-of-flowers. I have a rebate check I was going to cash today, I think I'll just put it in there instead.
Book Review!
This is the first book of Holman's I've read, although her previous book, "The Dress Lodger," made some noise.
The story centers around the small town of Three Chimneys, Virginia and several of its citizens. Margaret Prickett, a recently divorced cheesemaker with a 13-year-old daughter, is struggling to keep her farm afloat but is drowning under debts left her by her predecessors and years of estate taxes. She has pinned all her hopes on presidential hopeful Adams Brooke and his promise of a bill including a one-time debt-forgiveness amnesty for small farmers, and has trained her laser-beam focus on getting him elected. Meanwhile, a local woman, Manda Frank, has given birth to a world-record eleven babies, putting the town on the global stage and uniting the community...until the babies begin dying.
August Vaughn, Margaret's loyal longtime farm worker and Thomas Jefferson impersonator, has pined for her his entire adult life while he still lives at home with his mother and father, the local pastor. Pastor Vaughn is riddled with guilt because he was the one who encouraged Manda to have her babies even while every doctor in the world advised a selective reduction...Pastor Vaughn worries that his motives were not pure, that he wanted the children not for Manda's sake or because it was right but because it would unite his community.
Polly, Margaret's teenaged daughter, is in love with her subversive history teacher Mr. March, whose proclamations are just dangerous enough to be seductive.
Once Brooke is elected President, Pastor Vaughn concocts the idea of reenacting the famous incident when President Jefferson was given a mammoth cheese, and Margaret is unwittingly swept up in the town's enthusiasm for this endeavor...even while she watches helplessly as Polly and August both slip away from her.
Holman's writing is...well, the word that springs to mind is "lyrical," but I'm not sure that's right. It isn't dense or florid but it edges at times into pretentious, although it is very readable and comprises some lovely imagery. Her characterizations are very strong. Margaret is prickly and at times unlikeable. She is obsessed with protecting Polly to the point that she forbids her innocent modern entertainments and makes all her food and clothing from scratch to avoid the horrors of preservatives and artificial colors. And yet Holman makes us see Margaret's side, and we find ourselves thinking how nice it'd be to live on her farm with its fresh-baked bread and home-canned tomatoes.
Polly is a complicated teenager, frightfully smart, who yearns for escape but also yearns for her mother's way of life. Her infatuation with her teacher is awfully familiar...haven't we all had that one teacher who seemed so revolutionary? And yet this man's seeming integrity and dedication to principle is a fraud, and we don't sense the full extent of it until very late in the story.
August is in many ways an enigma. A quiet, eminently capable man who chooses to subvert his own desires for the sake of others...his parents and Margaret, mostly...finds that he only gets what he's most desired when he strikes out and claims a life of his own. The relationship between him and Margaret, while central to the story, is quiet and restrained and quite in the background, and its eventual resolution is just as quiet.
The ending is, in some ways, a tad melodramatic given the homey understatedness of the rest of the story, but not so much as to be a deal-breaker.
I recommend the book. It isn't a terribly quick read but neither is it a doorstop. I did it in about a week.