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Goldengrove: A Novel (Paperback)

by Francine Prose (Author)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Details

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (Aug 31 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060560029
ISBN-13: 978-0060560027
Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.7 x 2 cm
Shipping Weight: 205 g

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #174,568 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

In Prose's deeply touching and absorbing 15th novel, narrator Nico, 13, comes upon Gerard Manley Hopkins's Spring and Fall (which opens Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?) in her father's upstate New York bookstore, also named Goldengrove. It's the summer after her adored older sister, Margaret—possessed of beauty, a lovely singing voice and a poetic nature—casually dove from a rowboat in a nearby lake and drowned. In emotive detail, Nico relates the subsequent events of that summer. Nico was a willing confidant and decoy in Margaret's clandestine romance with a high school classmate, Aaron, and Nico now finds that she and Aaron are drawn to each other in their mutual bereavement. Unhinged by grief, Nico's parents are distracted and careless in their oversight of Nico, and Nico is deep in perilous waters before she realizes that she is out of her depth. Prose eschews her familiar satiric mode. She fluidly maintains Nico's tender insights into the human condition as Nico comes to discover her own way of growing up and moving on. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Prose locates the life force that gives her narrator the quirky, irreverent but undeniable sound of a survivor. . . . Prose is tremendously skilled." (Chicago Tribune )

"Insightful, lyrical... "Goldengrove" is beautifully and simply written...a moving portrait of the search for identity through a landscape of pain and loss." (St. Louis Post-Dispatch )

"Prose holds up a mirror to grief and family life we can't look away from, revealing their truths on page after page, in beautifully crafted writing." (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel )

"Arguably, "Goldengrove" is her best book yet." (Seattle Times )

"Deeply touching and absorbing..." (Publishers Weekly )

"With a dazzling mix of directness and metaphor, Prose captures the centrifugal and isolating force of grief...Prose exquisitely renders her characters' grief and bafflement." (Los Angeles Times )

"A poignant account of growing up amid sorrow...a tender and moving story of adolescent love." (Hartford Courant )

"...emotionally authentic...a ravishing novel of the mystery of death and life's assertion." (Booklist (starred review) )

"With perfect pitch and no trace of sentimentality, Prose . . . lands on the precise emotional key for this novel . . . allowing humor and compassion to seep through the cracks of an otherwise dark tale." (San Francisco Chronicle )

"Prose's skillful rendering of the human ability to accept hard truths and move on is a poignant lesson for us all." (Miami Herald )

"A beautiful narrative that defines resilience as the sometimes heartbreaking act of simply living" (Redbook Magazine )

"Beautifully crafted...perhaps her most emotionally satisfying novel." (Christian Science Monitor )

"An exploration of the fragility of adolescent identity and the perilous undertow of grief" (O magazine )

"Ms. Prose is perceptive. . . . Her modest-sounding book turns out to be beautifully wrought.... and yields an unexpectedly rich, tart, eye-opening sense of Nico's world." (New York Times )

"A page-turner, thanks to its wholly identifiable, and perfectly flawed, young heroine. A-" (Entertainment Weekly )

"Prose creates characters with real flaws that make the reader both love and hate them. It is easy to put oneself in the position of any of the players..." (Deseret Morning News )

"Francine Prose's new novel is a quiet, clear-eyed, sun-dappled eulogy to lost youth, and a youth lost. . . . [Prose is ] a keen chronicler of human emotion." (Elle )

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "It is Margaret you mourn for", Nov 15 2008

By	Michael Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Goldengrove: A Novel (Hardcover)

In this delicate study of remembrance and loss, author Francine Prose seems to be offering an antidote for grief. Goldengove begins with an accident, but its almost as if there is no explanation for why Margaret, the stunningly beautiful older sister of Nico suddenly drowns one afternoon while swimming home in the glassy and motionless Mirror Lake in Upstate New York. Indeed, the accident seems to simply occur, like a domino falling and collapsing, as almost over-night, Nico and her parents Henry and Daisy are thrust into a maelstrom of denial and grief that shatters their previously calm and transparent lives. Even as the search for Margaret`s body continues, with the divers dragging the lake, working day and night, Henry and Daisy hold Nico's hands with a steady pressure: half comfort and half restraint. Indeed, Margaret leaves behind a formidable reputation. The go-to and "it girl" and adored by those around her, Margaret was even rumored to be having sex with her handsome new boyfriend Aaron. A budding poet who also wanted to be a singer (her singing was always pure sex) Margaret was also a natural romantic and a lover of everything old - films, jazz songs, vintage postcards and clothes. She was also of the opinion that she was born too late.

Thinking back their early days with Margaret, Nico, Henry and Daisy are at a loss to deal with the state of her death. Once the idol of Nico's life, Margaret and her fit together so perfectly that Nico never anticipated such an abrupt estrangement. Each family member handles her absence differently: Henry seeks comfort in Goldengove his bookstore, spending his evenings and Sundays working on a book about how people in different cultures and eras imagine the end of the world. Daisy is diagnosed with arthritis which seems to get worse and worse as the weeks go by and she finds solace in pain-killers and Prozac. Meanwhile, Nico seems to despise everyone being alive while her poor sister is dead. For a while she works at Goldengove, her own "private kingdom," but when she gets an invitation from Aaron, "one day this summer, let's got for a ride. Hang out," what was once a relative stranger becomes a new and frightening friend.

Thrilled at the prospect of spending time with Aaron, Nico lies to her parents, going on long country drives with him and on dates to the movies while fanatically talking to him about art and the ghost of Margaret and where she might be and how she might be feeling. Obsessed with Margaret's shirt, which he insists that Nico keep wearing, Aaron seems to be in a constant golden glow, burnished by exhaustion and sadness and looking wasted but always so much more attractive to Nico, like a haunted, insomniac soul: "both of us had loved Margaret easily forming a hopeless love triangle with the dead." No doubt Margaret's death has shaken these people "like three dice in a cup" spilling them out with new faces in unrecognizable combinations: "we were wall flowers left behind when Margaret waltzed away."

Now sister less and forced to fumble through her teenage life, Nico must find a way to overcome the tragedy of Margaret's death while also trying to heal her fractured family, and that of Aaron's confusing needs. Clearly Henry and Daisy are the innocent victims of tragedy, the distractions of their own problems, and their separate solutions, keeping their attentions diverted safely away from Nico's secret life with Aaron. Certainly Aaron can't seem to rise above the grief, maybe her death has unhinged him, further loosening his screw. Meanwhile, Margaret always seems to be pulling the strings from beyond while Nico's grief over Margaret is "the hard little acorn she clutched to her chest." With the famous Gerard Manley Hopkins poem echoing throughout, the current lack of communication between the parties is surprising for such a previously close-knit family: "I'd imagined that Margaret's death had drawn our family closer, but now I understood that it had blown us apart." It is in part Margaret's death that puts it all in perspective and trumps everything that might seem huge to a normal person. In a beautifully meticulous narrative that characterizes a family in crisis, Francine Prose utilizes the themes of fleeting youth, mortality, time, age and innocence and death, and where what's going to happen is going to happen whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, Nico clashes with her family in a sticky net that seems to trap them all. The message might be bleak, but it is also one infused with great beauty, and surprisingly, a blank slate of possibilities. Margaret is gone, but over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Nico must wake up from the long fever dream in which her sister has tried to send her messages for her boyfriend. Only then can Nico and her parents come back from the brink and perhaps finally navigate the rocky road of healing and forgiveness. Mike Leonard November 08.

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