Customer Reviews

Above the Thunder

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This unusual novel has a quiet power in the telling and speaks to the nature of loss, as well as creating the loving relationships that sustain us. Love comes into our lives in many disguises, not all of them predictable. The trick is not to overlook those precious opportunities and nurturing connections, in whatever form they appear. Above the Thunder chronicles the friendship of a divergent group of people who meet, form a family and then, inevitably, move on, but permanently alter each other's lives, transcending time and place.

Anna Brinkman has created a simple world for herself, centered around work and a few friends since she lost her husband. The couple have a daughter, Poppy, who left home years before and failed to return in time for her father's death. Suddenly, a phone call interrupts the quiet days Anna has fashioned for herself: Poppy wants to come home for a visit with her husband and 12-year-old daughter, Flynn, whom Anna has never met. Once she gets past the shock of hearing Poppy's voice on the answering machine, Anna accepts the inevitable, although Poppy doesn't arrive as promised. But she sends her husband, Marvin, and Anna's granddaughter, Flynn. Like it or not, Anna's life has changed forever.

Meanwhile, in another household, Jack and Stuart, two gay men, believe they have at last accomplished the perfect relationship, devoted to each other, except for the handsome Jack's occasional dalliance. Eventually, Jack's careless indiscretions awaken him to the dangers of sexual promiscuity when he is diagnosed as HIV positive. After he informs his partner, Stuart asks him to leave. Jack joins Anna's HIV support group and they have an immediate connection, something neither of them expects. Certainly, Anna is pivotal in Jack's endeavor to redefine his life. Even after he reconnects with Stuart, resolving many of their most troubling issues, Jack's friendship with Anna remains steadfast and primary.

Flynn is at the core of this novel, a bright, intuitive little girl with an understanding far beyond her years, living in the midst of these randomly associated adults. Flynn's presence in the lives of those around her is a parable for family and belonging. The ethereal, ill-fated Flynn is an anachronism, a child riddled with dark fears and fierce imaginings, yet precious to all who meet her. Through Flynn, the characters access the deepest places in themselves, where forgiveness and generosity coexist.

Anna undergoes profound personal changes, loving Flynn and the others who now comprise her nuclear family. With her loving characters, Manfredi's prose transports her readers through the significant emotions that govern our days: joy, grief, compassion and love. The once self-contained Anna freely opens her heart, facing the consequences of this choice, affirming life over loss. Reminding us of those human connections that sustain us, more importantly, the author skillfully emphasizes the axiom that in life there is change. And where there is change, there is acceptance. Luan Gaines/2003.

One of the first things that struck me about Renee Manfredi's first novel is how precise, fully rounded and "real" her characters really are. Above the Thunder is a real treasure of a novel - smart, sophisticated, erudite, full of the richness of life, while also packing a real emotional punch. The novel is also remarkably "modern" in the way it approaches human relationships, and the friendships and connections that individuals develop with each other. For Manfredi, human relationships are never immutable and like the cells of the body, they grow and change, reflecting the constant and almost frenzied fluidity of life and society.

The core of Above the Thunder centers on Anna and her search for meaning in life. A newly widowed, Anna is almost disaffected and shut off from society. Wrapped up in her work as a medical technologist and grieving the dysfunctional relationship that she has had with her irresponsible, drug-addicted daughter, she is shocked and horrified when Marvin, her son-in-law comes to stay, bringing with him, Flynn, her imaginative, and emotionally conflicted ten-year-old grand daughter. It is Flynn, inspired and haunted by dreams and stories of reincarnation, which becomes the center of Anna's life, and forces her to re-evaluate her emotional emptiness. This is also the story of two lovers, Jack and Stuart, who are struggling with their own problems. Anna meets Jack at a support group for HIV patents, and what follows is a wonderful account of a friendship formed by two of the most unlikely of people.

Manfredi is extremely comfortable with her story; she lets the narrative flow at a nice, relaxed pace, effortlessly weaving the plot into the characters' inner lives. There is no doubt that she is a masterful storyteller, but it is her portrayal of character that is the real strength of the novel. Whether it is Jack - restless in his relationship with Stuart, searching the streets for Hector his hot Latino buddy, his world "empty at the center, his life without edges or direction." Or Stuart, kind, thoughtful and loyal, worried about Jack's cheating, and unsure whether to "confront him, ignore it, and hope it goes away, or leave him altogether." And Anna - disappointed as a mother and embittered but given a second chance when Flynn enters her life. The characters intertwine and interlace, just like the "jaded beads of a broken bracelet falling to the floor" or blood cells "dense and impenetrable as a blizzard." Life is inimitably connected, "everything is a circle." The moon, earth, the universe, and the cells of a body "even the future curved back through memory" - all are organized and interconnected. Above the Thunder is a profound and gorgeously written story, and a remarkably intuitive and symbolic look at the ties inevitably that bind us together.

Michael

I haven't read a book like this since Anne Marie McDonald's Fall On Your Knees - a truly remarkable novel with characters who are both relentlessly charming and haunting. This book will be around for a long time, and I have my bet placed on it as an Oprah's book club book within the year. Amazing first novel.

Renee Manfredi writes with compassion and depth about her characters. This is a remarkable story about friends and family, and how each relationship must be cherished for it is fragile.

The novel begins with some of the disappointments and surprises in the life of Anna Brinkman, a widowed, 50ish Boston medical technologist and academic. Anna's life drastically changes when her estranged daughter contacts her and soon after her son-in-law and wildly imaginative but troubled 10-year-old granddaughter, Flynn arrives at her doorstep. Flynn is the nucleus of this novel that the other complex ensemble of characters revolves around. Flynn believes in reincarnation and hears spirit voices. She shares her views with anyone who will listen.

This is a wonderful novel about human connections. Its characters will linger with the reader long after the novel is finished.

The author depicts a middle aged woman and two gay men so accurately.... Reading Above the Thunder reminded me of reading Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Here was a man writing so accurately about a woman...how did he do that? Renee depicts so accurately and gracefully a middle aged grieving woman, a grandparent falling in love with her grandchild, friends w/o family creating a family, two gay men struggling in their relationship... She is a master character writer. This was one of those books I couldn't wait to climb into bed to read at night. Like dessert at the end of the day. And I savored the last 100 pages...not wanting it to end.

I agree with one of the reviewers here who states the characters in this novel are shallow, but the depiction of their shallowness is otherwise. The protagonist Anna, her son-in-law, her neighbor, the gay couple Jack and Stuart--each of these people has seemingly reached the perpetual state of "unfazedness." Certainly, there are moments when each is upset, but these moments pass and they soon become people who will tolerate everything that reaches them, as if the other side of the coin, intolerance, is an absolute to be shunned. This feel-good, but sometimes destructive, mindset is manifested most strkingly in everyone's regard for the granddaughter Flynn. She is typically spoken of in terms that are somewhat offbeat, but complimentary. Even Publishers Weekly describes her as "remarkable." For this reader and reviewer, Flynnie was weird, first and foremost, and there is sufficient family history in the novel to caution that real help should have been the order of the day for this young girl. I found Manfredi's character relationships of interest, notwithstanding the faults of the individuals, mostly because they are built, oddly, not on mutual discovery of understanding, but mutually passive tolerance.

I don't often write reviews on amazon.com, and when I have it has always been because I've read something that has had such a positive impact on me that I felt I had to share it with others. This time, however, I'm writing this review because it has been a long time since I've read a book that offended me quite as much as this one did, and I'm still seething long after finishing it. As an intelligent, responsible gay man, I thought this novel showed promise -- the forging of a family from unlikely, disparate individuals. But it didn't take me long to realize that Renee Manfredi was just skimming the surface of this story. None of her characters are fully believable or true to life. However, it is her treatment and characterizations of gay men that immediately struck me as shallow and ill-informed -- gay men written by a heterosexual woman who likely has never intimately known a gay man in her life. Because the book reads very quickly, I stuck with it. But there were three points at which I literally had to stop myself from tossing this nonsense into the trash: 1) Two gay men help a young girl through her first exposure with a tampon while the girl's grandmother (who is the girl's primary caretaker) snoozes in the next room. How ridiculous and contrived is that? 2) These same two gay men and a straight woman hop on a plane and, for no coherent reason whatsoever, fly off to San Francisco to visit a sex club. Not only does this scene emerge out of nowhere; not only does it have absolutely no bearing on the rest of the story; this is a shameful, embarrassing and offensive plot point, given that one of the gay men has AIDS and the other two are his care-givers. 3) One gay man races across town on foot with a container to gather sperm from his partner who just happens to be trapped in his car in the midst of a traffic jam while a female friend (and the prospective mother) is ovulating on the floor of a public restroom. Puh-lease! If these three events strike you as interesting enough to be included in a book that pretends to be a serious novel, then this book is for you. On the other hand, if you find events like this disturbing, discouraging, and utterly ridiculous then don't waste your time or money on this patently offensive piece of tripe.

Every word in this novel is right. Manfredi has constructed a network of associations that will move anyone with a pulse. It took me a while to get into the book, but once I entered into the structure of the novel, I couldn't stop. It is a shame that a work this well crafted can be read in a few days.

Anna Brinkman is a 50 year old widow, and estranged from her only daughter for the last 12 years. Her story follows a torturous path filled with love for her husband Hugh and anxiety over a child she did not want. Poppy, her daughter calls mysteriously out of the blue from Alaska wanting to visit, with her husband Marvin and their unusual daughter Flynn. Anna reluctantly agrees to let them back in her life. Flynn's eccentricity dominates at times. You never get the whole story about Anna and Poppy. Some scenes are beyond the scope of realism and you have to ask does this make sense? You do see the palatable changes in Anna as she learns to love Flynn. Frustratingly Poppy never appears in the story. When Jack needs help, Anna is there for him and Stuart. The writing is rough around the edges with explanations and information gone astray; but overall it is a satisfying read.

I have to say I was disappointed in this book which I thought had a lot of promise. I loved the first chapter, and after that it went downhill quickly. Like the previous reviewer, I didn't get the relationship between the gay couple of Jack and Stuart, and I found the character of Jack completely unsympathetic. Why would anyone want to befriend him much less be in a relationship with him, or read another 300 pages about him. The character of Flynn is tragic, and why any kind of treatment for her is only attempted once when she's being cared for by a healthcare professional is beyond me. To give the author credit, despite the fact I kept complaining about the book to my partner, she did keep me intrigued enough to finish it...if only to see if one more piece of misery was going to be heaped onto the main character's life.