Customer Reviews

By the Book

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This book starts in the midst of the story, as all tales -- fiction or nonfiction -- must do, unless one begins with the start of Time. So the reader begins with a 2-dimensional view of Nettie with no real understanding of why she is caught in the particular situation in which she finds herself. Unfortunately, the blanks are never fully filled in for those who haven't been indoctrinated in the authoritarian, fundamentalist view of husband/wife, male/female, clergy/layperson relationships.

Also unfortunately, I have, so I could readily understand why Nettie initially felt herself trapped in the narrow sphere dictated by her husband. All her life she had sought refuge in passivity, a stance perversely bolstered by her sister's opposite reaction of fierce independence. Reasons for this are hinted at throughout the book, but never fully fleshed out. It took a childhood under the thumb of a difficult mother and years of grinding down by an anti-woman culture and the rule of a "nice" ("I'm only doing this for your own good") husband to bring her to the state she was in at the start of the book.

It took an unthinkable tragedy to shock her out of her numb state and bring her to a gradual realization of the self she had sublimated her whole life. I found her slow awakening realistic, because she wasn't just re-evaluating her current circumstances, she was having to redefine herself from the ground up.

As she reconnected with life, the narrative itself became more solid and "real." I found the descriptive passages quite evocative, especially as she travelled the almost-forgotten road to her almost-forgotten aunts, a trip in itself inspired by letters she discovered that had been written by a relative she'd never known. The parallel drawn between Nettie and this never-known woman was intriguing, but curiously left rather unresolved. Was Nettie consciously breaking away from the path chosen by this relative in the same way she was slowly letting go of the life she'd always lived?

In the end Nettie seemed to have reached at least the start of a journey where she made her own choices, in her own way, rather than sacrificing herself to others' expectations. For those who have had to struggle to launch a similar journey, the freeing of her soul will resonate. For others, whose experiences of soul suppression are different, it may seem to be much ado about little.