A young woman resisting the demands of her dependent family seeks escape in an increasingly dangerous outdoor adventure.
When Hannah Blue joins the Adventurer's Club, she pictures campfires and star-filled nights. And she imagines a temporary respite from the ever-present shadow of her parents' divorce, her siblings' inability to cope in the real world without her vigilance, and her boyfriend, Ben, who, it seems, is looking for a commitment. Most of all, she needs a break from the irresistible pull of her father, whose unpredictable moods and imaginary health scares have always kept him at the center of the family universe.
But when her father's latest illness turns out to be real, Hannah finds herself growing addicted to the freedom she finds in the silty caves deep beneath the sunlit woods, on the crevasses accessible only with crampons and ice axes. It's as if she feels more herself when she's outside -- until she realizes that the people she keeps leaving may not always wait for her to come back.
Featuring an appealing, spirited heroine and vivid outdoor settings, Getting Out surpasses the stylistic and storytelling promise displayed in Gwendolen Gross's first novel, Field Guide, and yields a fresh look at the high stakes of love's many expectations.
Hannah Blue feels trapped. Her Boston design agency job is unimaginative, her boyfriend wants to move in and her family is too needy. After a particularly demeaning encounter with her boss at the start of this creaky drama, Hannah happens upon her colleague Linda's entrancing vacation photographs and garners herself an invitation to a meeting of Linda's Adventurers' Club. So begins Hannah's obsession with the outdoors, the grueling hikes and punishing climbs providing a setting in which she is able to bond with new people while contemplating the direction her life is taking. Gross (author of the well-received Field Guide) is a competent writer, and Hannah's journey to self-discovery is in parts funny, touching and exhilarating. Boyfriend Ben, a museum curator, defies stereotype by being short (five foot six) and unafraid of commitment; Hannah's family members are equally unorthodox, though not fleshed out quite as well. As family problems mount her father has lupus, her brother and his wife are splitting up Hannah flees her increasingly chaotic life and goes on a solo expedition in the New Hampshire woods, which forces her to make some tough evaluations of her recent behavior and decide what it is she really wants. Her final decision has been obvious from the outset of the novel, which wouldn't be such a drawback if Gross's prose had more to offer than solid narrative, but the occasional attempts at stylistic flourishes ("sun spilled inside his lips") feel forced. Still, this is a capable performance, of particular interest to lovelorn hiking aficionados. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Gwendolen Gross Talks Sisterhood and The Orphan Sister BY RT BOOK REVIEWS, JULY 25, 2011 | PERMALINK
Today author Gwendolen Gross shares a behind the scenes look at her new novel, The Orphan Sister. Learn how this author's experiences and the love she shares with her siblings influenced her latest novel. And don't be surprised when this guest blog post brings tears to your eyes!
In one of my graduate school workshops, a terrific fellow from Brooklyn kept telling me, "You are clearly obsessed with da fatha, da son, da holy ghost. Always one in three!" His accent made me giggle, but he was wrong. Yes--I write quite a lot about threes, but I'm one of three sisters. And I'm Jewish.
Writing The Orphan Sister was easy, in some ways--the truths of sisterhood run like arteries through life, whether you have one sister, three sisters, no sisters. In fact, I have two sisters from one family, and another who is technically my half-sister, and a step-brother, though he may not be ushered to the fore at the flock of girls, but we used to run down mountains holding hands, so he's very much a part of my fictional narrative, and personal history, too.
There are many ideas about birth order--and I suppose I'm technically the middle child, the peace-maker, the one who wants everything to be alright. But who doesn't want everything to be alright? Let me know if first children are war-mongers or last children prefer bickering, because I haven't seen it like that. But I'm also an oldest in some ways, having lived with that step-brother for a while as a fourteen year old to his four. And then there's the youngest, Samantha, who is twenty years younger than I am. In many ways, she was the model for my character Clementine's feelings about Adam, her first nephew (and she caught that right away when she read the book). The first baby with whom I fell in love. I carried her in a snuggly and people asked whether she was my first--I was twenty, after all. I said no, I have two other sisters. But in some ways, she was a first--first chance to love a baby so much it hurt my body, arms bruised with the longing to hold, when I left to return to college, and then to fly cross-country when she was older. I missed her physically, the way you miss your own babies. But also the way you miss sisters.
My oldest sister, Claudia, taught me to read. I think she taught me to knit (though I'm sure Mom helped) because I have a weird combination style born of my sister's left-handedness. Apparently, we tried to off each other during the youngest years, but I don't remember that, I just remember that she was respite during parental storms, that I wanted to be like her, that I loved being her voice when she was too shy to ask the ice cream man for a fudgesicle. That my son smells like her in the mornings--that sometimes when I'm looking at him I see her, my first guide. My younger sister, Rebecca, was a wild thing when she was little--all frenetic naked energy and bright blue eyes. But as adults we've bonded over the mothering of boys.
Children have so little power, despite having much freedom. Everyone adult tells us what to do, what we can eat, where we are allowed to go. Sisters (and I mean this both specifically and metaphorically) can hold our hands to cross the street.
This review is from: Getting Out: A Novel (Hardcover)
Aptly named, Gwendolen Gross' second book has the same satisfying descriptions of nature as her previous book, Field Guide. The main character, Hannah, yearns to unzip and step out of the skin that is her life. Knowing how that feels, I give this book five stars. If you love the outdoors, you'll love Hannah's adventures.
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This review is from: Getting Out: A Novel (Hardcover)
The day after finishing "Getting Out," I threw together some gorp and went canoeing with my 4-year-old son. It was just too much to sit in my backyard for yet one more day and let a fictive character have all the adventure. And Hannah Blue does have the adventures. What with bats and murky cave water and kissing in tents, there is plenty of occupation to keep Hannah at a distance from her troublesome family and from making any commitments to her adoring boyfriend. I loved Gross's descriptions and turns of phrase that make this book an adventure of language as well -- a characteristic that was also present in her first book, Field Guide. What made the book one I couldn't put down, though, were her truisms, sprinkled in like spring water, that reveal the real Hannah beneath the backpacking wonder. Her escapades, it seems, are keeping her from the deeper, more complicated adventure at hand: the work of relationships. How this drama plays itself out is what made it hard for me to put this book down.
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This review is from: Getting Out: A Novel (Hardcover)
Just finished reading Getting Out, and I thought it was just great. Main character Hannah is trapped in her mundane design job and distracted by her dysfunctional family. She joins the Adventure Club on a whim and becomes part of a hodgepodge group of adventure seekers whom she never truly learns much about. However, she does learn a lot about herself. I found the characters easy to relate to and really enjoyed the conclusion to this fun read.
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