Goldengrove: A Novel [Paperback]

Francine Prose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2009

After the sudden death of her beloved older sister, thirteen-year-old Nico finds her life on New England's idyllic Mirror Lake irrevocably altered. Left alone to grope toward understanding, she falls into a seductive, dangerous relationship with her sister's boyfriend. Over one haunted summer, Nico faces that life-changing moment when children realize their parents can no longer help them as she experiences the mystery of loss and recovery. Still, for all the darkness at its heart, Goldengrove is radiant with the lightness of summer and charged by the restless sexual tension of adolescence.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Author and essayist Francine Prose's novel Goldengrove will be a surprise to readers familiar with her famously razor-sharp dialogue and tough-love attitude towards her memorable characters. In this affecting coming-of-age novel, Prose introduces us to Nico, a chubby thirteen-year old girl who imagines nothing more than keeping her parents at arms length and hanging out with her older sister, Margaret and her charismatic boyfriend during the long summer break. Instead, Nico finds herself navigating the perilous course of mourning after her beloved sister drowns in the lake just beyond the family's home. With little support from her grief-stricken parents, she must come to terms with the tragedy largely on her own. Prose's ability to situate the adult reader within the heart and mind of young Nico is quite remarkable, and verges on the poetic. Goldengrove is a poignant story that prompts us to retrace those often long-forgotten, but monumental early steps towards acceptance and understanding. --Lauren Nemroff --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In Prose's deeply touching and absorbing 15th novel, narrator Nico, 13, comes upon Gerard Manley Hopkins's Spring and Fall (which opens Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?) in her father's upstate New York bookstore, also named Goldengrove. It's the summer after her adored older sister, Margaret—possessed of beauty, a lovely singing voice and a poetic nature—casually dove from a rowboat in a nearby lake and drowned. In emotive detail, Nico relates the subsequent events of that summer. Nico was a willing confidant and decoy in Margaret's clandestine romance with a high school classmate, Aaron, and Nico now finds that she and Aaron are drawn to each other in their mutual bereavement. Unhinged by grief, Nico's parents are distracted and careless in their oversight of Nico, and Nico is deep in perilous waters before she realizes that she is out of her depth. Prose eschews her familiar satiric mode. She fluidly maintains Nico's tender insights into the human condition as Nico comes to discover her own way of growing up and moving on. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 Reprint edition (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060560029
• ISBN-13: 978-0060560027
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (85 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,065,795 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Francine Prose is the author of sixteen books of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. A former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Francine Prose lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite Prose, September 16, 2008

By 

Janet Boyer "Author, Blogger, Radio Host" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Goldengrove: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

"When I said I didn't want to go out, they sounded a little annoyed, as if I was acting princessy and spoiled. Why didn't I appreciate the good deed they were doing? They seemed relieved when I said no and they could hang up before I changed my mind or started crying. Naturally, they sounded strange. They weren't talking to the same person. I was no longer Nico. I was the dead girl's sister." -- From Goldengrove

Choosing this book to review from the Amazon Vine Program was an utter gamble on my part, for I never heard of Francine Prose and wasn't sure if I was up to a book on grief (especially having lost my first husband to leukemia).

What I discovered while reading Goldengrove was an author who had the extraordinary ability to paint subtle word pictures that animates sunlight, dust, song, shirt, fireworks, ice cream, pond scum and other surroundings normally overlooked on a given day. But arguably author Francine Prose's best gift, at least in this book, is offering an unflinching, accurate portrayal of the way individuals differ in handling grief.

I won't provide you plot details, for others have done so and I don't want to spoil your experience.

What I wish I could communicate (but words are failing me) is the uncanny ability the author has for getting under your skin--making you sympathize and squirm, exult and panic--by writing a book that appears to have a straightforward plot: a girl drowns, and her family and the dead girl's boyfriend attempt to deal with it.

While Goldengrove may sound like a depressing book, it's not. Sobering, yes...it catapulted me into a very contemplative mood for a day ("Gothic" my husband remarked). But death is a part of life, and how individuals deal with grief is as varied as the people on the planet (although the five stages simmer somewhere amongst the grief stew--denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance).

Francine Prose's writing is pure poetry. I marveled at it--pondered it. I read passages to my husband. One part, where she described why her sister had a buggy startled look in her school portrait, had me laughing so hard that my stomach hurt. I tried to read it to my husband, but everytime I started, I lost it. After the fifth time, I just handed the book to him so he could read it for himself...

There are too many gorgeous passages to highlight in this review, but here's a small sampling of Prose's writing style:

"If all the clocks and calendars vanished, children would still know when Sunday came. They would still feel that suck of dead air, that hollow vacuum created when time slips behind a curtain, when the minutes quit their ordering tick and ooze away, one by one. Colors are muted, a jellylike haze hovers and blurs the landscape. The phone doesn't ring, and the rest of the world hides and conspires to pretend that everyone's baking cookies or watching the game on TV. Then Monday arrives, and the comforting racket starts up all over again."

If you're looking for a feel-good novel or a beach read, this is not for you. No, Goldengrove is work to be enjoyed by those who appreciate nuance, the art of words, and the vagaries of human experience portrayed with sheer artistry.

I am glad I chose to read Goldengrove. It was time well spent. It reminded me to treasure every fleeting moment, take nothing for granted, and be grateful for the living around me.

I'm also glad to discover Francine Prose, and will be putting her books--fiction and non-fiction--on my Amazon WishList.

For the discerning, Goldengrove is a novel well-worth the time spent in its presence.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "It Is Margaret You Mourn For", September 6, 2008

By 

Susan K. Schoonover "Sue Yingling" (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Goldengrove: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I almost entitled this review with the quote from the book "hopeless love triangle with the dead" and though that does describe a major theme there is much more to the story than that. The book is set in present day upstate New York and the narrator of the book is Nico who is apparently writing from the future as she describes the summer she was thirteen and her beloved sister Margaret drowned due to an undetected heart ailment shortly before her high school graduation. Margaret was a "star" in their small town, a beautiful girl and talented singer with her own unique style. Nico, at the time of the tragedy, was a bookish and chubby thirteen, curiously watching and wondering about her glamorous sister's relationship with Aaron, a budding artist, who is disapproved of by her parents probably because of some bipolar tendencies that are shown as the book progresses. After Margaret's death Aaron took an interest in transforming Nico into a replica of her sister and I am very grateful the author did not take that relationship any farther than she did.

GOLDENGROVE is an exquisitely written, insightful, short novel with many well drawn and sympathetic characters including Nico and Margaret's aging hippie parents, Elaine a single mom of a handicapped child and her son Tycho a quite realistically drawn person with autism. Prose references many things from history and pop culture such as the 19th century cult the Millerites, the 60's pop singer Nico, and Hitchcock's movie VERTIGO all of which sent me scrambling to the internet to find out more about them. This is a good choice for both adults and teens who want a story with strong and ultimately life affirming themes.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Depressingly beautiful..., September 21, 2008

By 

Sofia Hernandez "Maddy, Eli & Joshy's Mom" (Woodside, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Goldengrove: A Novel (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I LOVED this book! This is truly a beautiful story that shows the mourning side of death. What happens when someone close to you passes on? What happens to the families, boyfriend/girlfriend & friends??

The author paints a beautiful picture with her words. The descriptions are laced with an artistic aura that makes you truly understand what the characters are feeling.

This story is about 13 year old Nico and the close relationship that she had with her older sister, Margaret. We are given a short chapter that truly shows the beautiful bond of sisterhood and then sadly Margaret passes before her time. She leaves behind, Nico, her parents and an artistic boyfriend "with a screw loose". It weaves in and out as each member tries to come to terms with her death.

The father retreats into his bookstore, the mother into abusing prescription medications, the boyfriend wants to bring back Margaret through Nico and finally Nico is trying to figure out how she will get through the Summer without her sister/best friend; yet alone the rest of her life. She goes quickly from an immature 13 year old to a young woman with pain and desires. Nico comes to the realization that everything is crumbling around her and that her parents are weak.

The part that intrigued me at first was the relationship that slowly build between Nico & Margarets' boyfriend. I wanted the romance; instead I was given a long hard look into the reality of a man trying to bring back his dead girlfriend through her younger sister. It pained me to see that Nico was feeling desires and the reality was this man doesn't love her for herself. The author finally shows us why the boyfriend "had a screw loose" in a climactic end when Nico put an end to the perverse games that he was playing.

I loved the references to many old movies and actors. The characters' were a breath of fresh air. They weren't the cookie cutter, pretty popular girl, jock guy etc etc; they had depth which I appreciated so much.

I am now going to seek out more works by this lovely and talented author. Highly recommend this read, but I will say now that it is rather depressing.