When he discovers that he has a half sister who was abandoned in infancy by his mother, he asks Lucy to go to Maine and meet the half sister on his behalf.
The three female narrators of this novel are, refreshingly, all outside the age range—the years of romantic possibility, from teens to motherhood—during which authors tend to find a woman most interesting: a nine-year-old girl, precocious and anxiously protective of her family; her mother, pregnant and frustrated; and the family’s matriarch, an indignant, joyful survivor of an authoritarian, religious upbringing.
“It’s didactic, haughty, and uninviting.” She champions more conceptual, interactive memorials—like the engraved steel columns suspended in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorating victims of lynching—and suggests that a world of empty plinths might be salutary.
The Gilded Page, by Mary Wellesley , resulted in texts that were anything but stable.
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