And Give You Peace [Paperback]

Jessica Treadway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

How do you survive when the desperate action of a loved one has shattered your family? In this compelling novel, a young woman, Anastasia Dolarn, courageously examines her seemingly normal childhood to uncover the motivations behind an unspeakable tragedy. Jessica Treadway flawlessly portrays the complexity of human experience in the face of incomprehensible loss, revealing yet again why the New York Times Book Review has called her "a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title of this intensely imagined first novel by short story writer Treadway (Absent Without Leave) comes from a Christian hymn and benediction, and its denouement is fittingly redemptive. Set in a small town near Albany, N.Y., the story is narrated by Anastasia Grace Dolan, whose father, threatened with divorce, inexplicably killed himself and his youngest daughter, 16-year-old Meggy, one June morning 12 years earlier, leaving recent college graduate Anastasia, middle sister Justine and their mother to absorb the echoing horror. In virtually crime-free Ashmont, the shooting sent shock waves through the whole town. Thinking back on what she thought was an idyllic childhood, Anastasia tries to pinpoint when she first sensed that trouble was brewing, "looking for meaning in small, forgotten things." She remembers a modified cheerleading song ("We are the Dolans, mighty, mighty Dolans") the family would sing to ease themselves past difficult spots, a trip they took to Boston, a summer spent building a tree house. Her father, an unsuccessful car salesman, was always sensitive and finicky, but Anastasia wonders now whether his fixation on cleanliness and order might have been a full-fledged obsessive-compulsive disorder that spiraled his mind into madness. She wonders, too, about her mother, who seems to have recovered much too quickly from the murder-suicide. Although the author's vision of a viable peace for a shattered family is occasionally unfocused , the final impression she leaves is that of a loving regeneration of life through the flowering of memory and emotion. Treadway's careful craftsmanship and her unobtrusive grounding of the narrative with details of smalltown life add authenticity to a moving exploration of promising lives detoured into tragedy and reaffirmed through the sharing of buried secrets and a willingness to forgive. Agent, Richard Parks.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Treadway's debut novel is the exploration of a family's devastating loss and its aftermath. When Tom Dolan goes into the room of his daughter Meggy, shoots her in her sleep, and then kills himself, his daughters Anastasia and Justine and his wife Margaret are in shock. Although he was a man who had to control every little detail in his life to the point of obsession, they cannot believe that he would kill his beloved youngest daughter. While her mother and sister fall into passive shock, Anastasia actively determines to find out the reasons for her father's unbelievable actions. But even when her search turns up answers, she is often left with more questions than when she began. Gradually Anastasia comes to the realization that some things can't be understood and that this is the only resolution she will get. The story has no tidy ending, and Treadway wisely doesn't attempt to tack one on. Instead, each of the characters is coping and somehow, perhaps because it has to be, that's enough. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555973159
• ISBN-13: 978-1555973155
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,273,708 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wealth and Range of Emotion with Anastasia, December 30, 2000

By 

"bpmc001" (Brookline, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: And Give You Peace (Paperback)

I read "And Give You Peace" with excruciating wonder. It's a gorgeous amalgamation of pain, humor, tenderness, insanity, vulnerability, strength and finally wisdom. This outstanding sort of fusion is made possible by a remarkable narrator, one that fills the book with a solidly authoritative, yet damaged and world weary voice. The clarity and precision with which Anastasia, the book's narrator, tells her story produced in me a trust that lasted the entirety of the book. There are no "cheap shots" here, nothing comes easy. The relationships within the family are written with a subtlety that charmes: a look here, a glance there, an emotion unsaid. It's refreshing to read into characters with a reader's imagination without the forced focus of overbearing prose. Treadway's style allows your imagination to be an anonymous character in the book, something that allowed me to cherish the book even more. The pages of "And Give You Peace" pulsate with a vitality that Anastasia's voice carries throughout the book, melding with the tragic undercurrents. For me, the book reaffirms the importance of living WITH circumstance, rather than merely living through it. I love the book. My reading of "And Give You Peace" has been time well spent, and I am a better man for having read it. Be prepared for a wealth and range of emotion. Good stuff.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Approaching the impossible truth, December 26, 2000

By 

Kathleen Cushman "#kidsvoices on Twitter" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: And Give You Peace (Paperback)

There is a moment of intimate shock in Jessica Treadway's novel AND GIVE YOU PEACE where the narrator, eldest sister of three, breaks out of the third-person convention into direct address to her reader. "Do you know that hymn?" she asks, as with her mother and surviving sister she makes her way to the graves of her father and the little sister he has murdered at the start of this riveting, heartbreaking story of family love. "The words move across the music with a sharp, sweet pain, which, once you've felt it, stays as memory in your bones: The Lord bless you and keep you, / The Lord lift his countenance upon you, / . . . The Lord make his face to shine upon you, / And give you peace." In that brief and unrepeated narrative break Treadway holds her reader naked against this story's almost unbearable pulse, branding it into bone-memory too.

AND GIVE YOU PEACE begins by relating the unspeakable and then unfolds like a long, confidential murmur to an intimate friend -- filled with bitchy asides, hilariously observed detail, and unreplicable sisterly lore -- which its listener never wants to stop. Anastasia Dolan needs us to know the whole story if we are to understand, finally, the worst of it; so she moves us matter-of-factly back from the day her father snapped, and into the sweet thicket of family connection that binds the Dolans close in its thorny embrace. ("We are the Dolans, mighty mighty Dolans," they sing on car trips, echoing the cheer.) And as we hear the details -- the father's compulsions about contagious disease, the girls' rivalries, the way the mother accommodates and compromises them all -- a picture of love emerges so truthful that even the most repugnant fact, in the end, can yield a kind of peace.

Treadway's ability to pull this off -- to render joy through unimaginable pain -- starts with her masterful narrative choice to give us the bad news first. Going back from there, she unearths everything we'll need to go on. And so when the narrator turns her voice nakedly to us at the cemetery -- "Do you know that hymn?" -- we flinch in recognition, and then enter the grieving circle, willingly or not. We are the Dolans, too, approaching impossibility one step at a time, singing our sad triumphant song into the past and into the possible future.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It will move you, December 28, 2000

By 

"mgm1031" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: And Give You Peace (Paperback)

Very rarely can a novel bring me to tears--this one did. Treadway's story of a family trying to piece together the clues of an unthinkable tragedy works like a mystery-in-reverse. Though we know the outcome at the start, rather than simply flashback to find the clues, the story instead moves forward, following the characters as they struggle to go on with their lives. This forward movement, in turn, provides the backdrop and the impetus for investigation of the past. In this forward-yet-backward movement, Treadway masterfully keeps us riveted in the what-will-happen, while at the same time engaging us in the mystery of the what-did-happen. It's a fresh and interesting way to build a narrative, and kept me rapt from the first page through the last.

Not only is it artfully constructed, it also has amazing emotional depth--I cried not for the characters, but for myself, because I had BECOME the characters. Treadway has such a beat on the pulse of human nature that the reader slips effortlessly into the world of the novel, recognizing one's own thoughts, feelings, quirks and actions on every page. Though few people can say they have experienced the same tragedy as this family, the feelings and behaviors of the characters are so real, so everyday, that it's impossible not to experience the characters themselves.

It's a wonderful novel and acheives the rare combination of literary mastery with page-turning pace. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys excellent fiction of any genre.