Downhill Chance: A Novel [Paperback]

Donna Morrissey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 2003

With Kit’s Law, Donna Morrissey established herself as a gifted storyteller. Her chronicle of life in a remote Newfoundland outport was acclaimed by critics and embraced by readers worldwide. Downhill Chance is a captivating successor to Morrissey’s first novel. Set in a pair of isolated fishing communities in Newfoundland during and after the Second World War, this is the story of two families joined by friendship but torn apart by fear and sorrows.
Prude Osmond reads her tea leaves and predicts dark days ahead. Meanwhile, an hour’s boat ride away, Job Gale leaves his wife and two young daughters behind to fight in the war, a cause neither they nor their neighbors understand. The war and the dark secrets it holds cascade over the Gale family, afflicting the sensitive yet resourceful Clair, an unforgettable heroine. Forced to restart her life in another place, she must forsake the family she loves and her community.
Morrissey blends drama, gritty realism, and a flair for the comic in this unique novel. At its core is the unravelling of secrets — and the redemption that truth ultimately brings.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Morrissey's sprawling second novel (after Kit's Law) once again takes readers to a fishing community on the coast of Newfoundland. There, life for the Gale family is disrupted when father Job Gale decides to enlist as a soldier in WWII. His eldest daughter, Clair, still a girl, takes on the tasks he left behind, caring for her younger sister, Missy, and her mother, Sare, who is undone by Job's absence. Things don't get much easier when Job returns, discharged after a shrapnel injury. He is shell-shocked, depressed and prone to fits. These events are told from the point of view of Clair, who becomes a teacher and marries the son of another local family, Luke Osmond. Woven in with the Gales' story is that of the O'Maras, Irish immigrants who wash ashore after a shipwreck. The second half of the novel shifts to the point of view of Hannah, Clair's daughter, who describes the scandal that Missy causes when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, as well as the revelations about Job's military service that emerge after his death. With vivid imagery and a fantastic ear for dialect, Morrissey breathes life into the small harbor town, where gossiping neighbors and eccentrics are a small price to pay for the comforts of living in a place where everyone knows one another. The novel is overstuffed with plot turns and family melodrama, but Morrissey keeps the story moving at a pleasant clip; readers may lose track of subplots, but they won't be bored.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In this superb successor to her acclaimed first novel, Kit's Law (2001), Morrissey returns to the insular world of Newfoundland's remote fishing villages. The story begins during World War II, when Job Gale enlists in the army. That decision has far-reaching ramifications, not only for Job but also for his wife, Sare, and his daughters, Clare and Missy. It is primarily through Clare's eyes that we see life during and after the war, as old secrets and fresh wounds drive the inhabitants of the Basin and Rocky Head, a nearby outport where Clare eventually takes a job as a teacher, marries, and gives birth to a daughter as headstrong as herself. A palpably Faulknerian sense of the past ("The past is never dead; it's not even past") influences every action Clare and those around her take (or fail to take). This is an often heartbreaking, ineffably sad story of constricted lives, bent by bitterness and twisted by dreaming the wrong dreams. At the same time, however, it is an achingly beautiful novel, and Clare is an unforgettable heroine--courageous, passionate, determined to recover the unrecoverable, yet able to recognize her own wrongheadedness. Morrissey is capable of bursts of lush, melodic prose, but she never gets caught up in her own eloquence. She has a comic touch, too, even in the midst of great sadness. And, best of all, her sense of place is overpowering--not just the natural beauty of remote Nefoundland but also the almost suffocating intimacy of outport life. A major novel by a remarkable writer. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; None edition (July 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618189270
• ISBN-13: 978-0618189274
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,840,933 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars she did it again!!!!!!!, August 22, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Downhill Chance (Paperback)

2 for 2, her first novel "Kits Law" had me "up all night". Now "Downhill Chance" did the same.

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not great in the ending, July 23, 2005

By 

Cheryl Traub (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Downhill Chance (Paperback)

I thought this book was really good when I first started reading it. It was a great realistic family story, but then in the end lots of confusing stuff happened and the ending wasn't great. Just not one of the best books I read.