House of Women (Paperback)

At seventeen Thea is starved for male affection, so when her father invites a male friend over for dinner she enjoys the attention this man showers upon her. But, her visions of love quickly crumble when she is abruptly ripped from her home, married, and sent away on a ship to a remote island with her new husband (who is old enough to be her father).

In her new life she desperately misses her mother, who has left her poorly equipped to make decisions by keeping her so sheltered. She shares a deep bond with her mother as well as a conflicted relationship and resentment from being locked behind the gates of her home and raised by the housekeeper.

The perspective of the book alternates between Nalia's experience and Thea experiencing her own life as a letter to Nalia.

This book deals with themes of incest and rape with many disturbing surprises emerging from these plot lines. We also see how love develops and transforms within the prisons that confine Thea, and how one prison leads to the decisions of her next imprisonment.

By the end of the book I was desperate to find out what the final completion would be, knowing that at any moment a new element may emerge.

Nalia and her daughter, Theodora, live in a house surrounded by a fence with a padlocked gate, immune to the passions of the outside world. A Holocaust survivor, Nalia wishes to keep her daughter close as a shadow, perhaps even growing old together, so that she need never be alone. Nalia understands men and their selfish ways and considers them untrustworthy buffoons, including Thea's philandering father, as he briefly drifts in and out of their lives.

The years pass, and Thea's childish innocence is replaced by the romantic musings of adolescence; she begins to chafe at her mother's claustrophobic constraints. The years of living so intimately have corrupted their mother/daughter relationship's progression through it's natural stages into the roles of captor and prisoner. In one shocking afternoon, the padlock on the gate is broken open and Thea elopes with a mysterious older man, her father's old friend, leaving a desolate Nalia howling with despair.

Nalia is alone, after all, without her beloved companion and Thea finds herself isolated on an island with a possessive husband that refuses to release her. Even when she becomes pregnant and gives birth to twins, he will not allow her to leave and take the children to meet their grandmother, fearful that she won't return. The two women struggle, each in their own way, to survive their forced separation, both filled with regret. They are, after all, the victims of time, which can never be contained, no matter how carefully its reality is avoided.

Finally, seduced by memory, Nalia and Thea are tormented by their intense longing to see each other, to renew their closeness, and unable to find release from the power of their fierce emotions. Their bond of blood, as old as time, cannot be severed. Lives complicated by ancient lies and hidden truths, each must find the way back, to forgive the unforgivable. With consummate skill, Freed's vibrant characters fill the pages of House of Women, flaunting their obsessions, passions, and finally, their deep love for one another. Luan Gaines/2003.