Entering Normal [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Anne LeClaire (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002

In the tradition of The Good Mother and The Deep End of the Ocean, Anne D. LeClaire delivers a heartbreaking–and breathtaking–novel of two very different but equally loving mothers who face the most painful of losses and then find the courage not only to go on but to find meaning and hope in their lives.

Rose Nelson is a middle-aged woman with a broken past, a sorrow from which she cannot recover. Secretly guilty about her role in her teenaged son’s death five years ago, she has sealed herself off from life, enveloped by a grief that has slowly eaten away at her relationship with her husband.

Against her will, Rose is drawn into the world she has avoided when Opal Gates and her five-year-old son, Zack, move in next door. Determined to start an independent life for herself, twenty-year-old Opal has left her family and the father of her son in North Carolina. But when she quickly begins an affair with Tyrone Miller, a part-time mechanic and local musician, Opal unwittingly breaks the tacit rules of both her family and her new hometown.

Initially, Rose cannot bear the sight of Opal and her son. But later when Zack is injured, she instinctively lies to protect Opal from a single mistake that changes the lives of everyone involved.

Faced with a custody suit brought by Zack’s father and her own parents, Opal faces a trial in which each choice she has made will be used as ammunition in the battle to take Zack away from her.

Confronting such devastating loss and the questions it poses are at the heart of Entering Normal. How does one go on after great tragedy? What is a family? What sacrifices must a mother be willing to make for her child? And how can a good mother sometimes make bad choices?

Entering Normal is a story of family, a novel about courage, loss, risk, and betrayal. It is a story that goes to the heart of love.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Anne D. LeClaire's Entering Normal, two women are bound by the shared trials of motherhood: birth, hope, separation, and grief. Though Rose Nelson is an older woman still mourning her son, who died five years ago, and Opal Gates is a young single mother scrabbling to raise her 5-year-old son, the two women begin to cleave together.

Both move through their worlds in a dreamlike trance, only surfacing above their own self-absorption when confronted by the violence of life: infidelity, passion, jealousy, and death. Though emotionally clueless men bumble around Rose and Opal, they are never able to pierce through these women's barriers. Rose and Opal are too convinced of their own needs--Opal believes she needs no one, while Rose focuses only on her dead son. As the two begin to find each other, the reader awaits the moments of growth that allow them to see beyond themselves. As Rose entertains hope, so does the reader, "In the morning light, for one brief moment, she ... can almost believe that she has already experienced her lifetime's allotment of pain and grief." LeClaire's skill for describing human action succeeds here as well, as her characters fail and triumph with realistic probability. Alternately melodious and emotionally torturous, Almost Normal is a moving debut. --Nancy R.E. O'Brien --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

An emotional wallop comparable to that produced by Sue Miller's The Good Mother or Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World awaits readers of LeClaire's latest (after Sideshow, etc.). In the small town of Normal, Mass., Rose Nelson has never ceased grieving over the accidental death of her teenage son, Todd. Years of unremitting grief and compulsive housecleaning have dismayed and frustrated her devoted husband, Ned, who tries to lose himself in work at the filling station he owns. Rose notices a peculiar itch around a mole that could indicate cancer, but tries to dismiss it because she doesn't trust drugs or doctors. At the same time, 20-year-old Opal Gates arrives in town with her young son, Zack, in tow. On the lam from her boyfriend, Billy, and her nagging mother in New Zion, N.C., stubborn, flighty Opal has landed in Normal because that's how far exactly three full tanks of gas have taken her chance and signs are central to her life. When she rents the house next door to the Nelsons, prudent Rose observes that "girls like Opal suck trouble to them" and resolves not to get involved. Though striving for independence and ambivalent about a new romance, Opal does seem fated to attract trouble. First, Zack breaks his arm when she sneaks out to the store while he's sleeping; then Billy, with Opal's parents' help, files a custody suit. The tentative friendship that slowly develops between Opal and Rose sustains both women as they face new obstacles and old demons, and the saga of these endearing (if at times frustrating) characters will hold readers' interest right up to the bittersweet ending. Agent, Deborah Schneider.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Ulverscroft Large Print Books Ltd; Large Print edition edition (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0708947255
• ISBN-13: 978-0708947258
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,696,711 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ultimately Disappointing, July 4, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Entering Normal (Hardcover)

The reviews I read of this book made me very anxious to read it, as I too have lost a child and knew that I'd certainly be able to relate to the feelings of the grieving mother, Rose. Being drawn to this book because of Rose, I was intrigued about her life, the course of her grief over her son and the development of this unlikely friendship between her and Opal. Though the description of Rose's grief rang true to me, I felt that the book, as a whole, was full of holes, poorly developed characters and a faulty, contrived plot line. Though I finished it, I didn't really feel, by the end, that I knew Rose and Opal at all or that I understood who they were deep in their souls or why they would even be drawn to each other as friends, other than because of the surface circumstances of their lives. Opal was a truly botched character, and somehow she never came together for me as someone who was sympathetic in any way. She was angry and full of rage about her childhood, her family and Billy, she took lots of this rage out on Ty, I couldn't feel the development of anything true and real between them besides lust and sex...and she shared her rage with almost every character in the book with her charming (?) attitude. (All of her supposedly humorous self-talk about others in the book became really annoying to me after about the second time...and the book was loaded with these stupid, unfunny, private glimpses into Opal's feelings about people!) Also, though I am a really good cusser who is not offended by much, I felt that her sailor's mouth was way overdone. Rose also suffered from the same lack of character development, I thought, and was a shadowy and foggy figure throughout whom we didn't get to know in any substantive way, either. And the ending was almost unbearable to me. It was so contrived, tucking in all the loose ends and coming up with a neatly wrapped package of unreality and illusion that left me with feelings of "Oh, right!" and "Come on, Anne Leclaire, do you really expect us to believe this?" This book was, ultimately, a major disappointment for me and a major waste of my cherished reading time. I do see lots of 5 star ratings for this book, though, and I am very puzzled and wondering: Did we all read the same book? If so, I must certainly have missed something!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breaking down the walls of the heart, January 25, 2002

By 

Paula Hess (Iowa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entering Normal (Hardcover)

I was a little disappointed to see so many people did not like this book. I for one found it to be one of the best I have ever read. Two mothers who have built emotional walls around their hearts concerning their children. Opal the young mother who may lose her son simply because she doesn't fit the mold of a perfect mother. Rose who lost her teenage son five years ago in an accident that she feels is her fault. These two have both built a wall around themselve that they find in the end has to be overcome. Rose is finally able to come to terms with how deep she has fallen into despair and that life does hold another chance for her. Opal learns that you can trust and I think that is all this book needed to say in the end. Entering Normal the perfect title for a great book.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking, July 19, 2001

By 

BeachReader (Delaware) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entering Normal (Hardcover)

This book managed to keep me occupied for hours on a plane, always the mark of an engaging story to me!

"Entering Normal" is the story of emotional and painful times in the lives of two very different women, but it never descends into angst, nor do the main characters ask for pity.

Rose is 50 and lost a son, her only child, in a car accident five years ago. Opal is 20 and is running away from her controlling family and the father of her five-year old son when she rents a house next door to Rose's. How these two women *rescue* each other, emotionally and otherwise, is the topic of this novel.

Rose has been consumed by grief for five years because of her imagined guilt. Opal is trying to keep custody of her child. The bond of motherhood brings these women together and allows them to help each other in ways that neither would have imagined.

Anyone who has experienced the joys and sorrows of parenthood will be able to relate to these sentences :"Watching him, she feels a familiar jolt in her stomach, the sharp, sweet terror of motherhood." "Having a child is like having your heart walk around outside of your body, bumping into things."

Rose tries to write what she feels, keeping this a secret from her husband, Ned, who cannot manage, despite his best efforts, to penetrate her grief. Le Claire writes: "She wrote all about Todd and how she missed him and how one minute a person could be in your life, laughing and smiling and driving you crazy with their foolishness, and then the next, with no warning, they were gone and all the words you never got a chance to say would be locked up inside you, and what ever happened to words locked inside, where did they go?" Food for thought.