Goldengrove: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: staircase spirit, Francine Prose, Senior Show, Miller's Point (more...)

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

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.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (September 16, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066214114
• ISBN-13: 978-0066214115
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #277,405 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Janet Boyer "JanetBoyer.com" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

(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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, But Misses the Mark, September 29, 2008

By	B. Case "InquiringMind" (Redondo Beach, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Francine Prose's latest novel, "Goldengrove," is a subtle, quiet, reflective novel about a family's journey through overwhelming grief after the sudden death of the eldest daughter. The novel takes place over the course of one terrible summer. The action focuses on Nico, the surviving daughter, as she battles with grief, depression, and loss of identity...all at the same time that her body is awakening to its own budding sexuality. Nico is an awkward 13-year old, unsure of who she is, and how her life may unfold. Her identity has always been entwined tightly with that of her three-years-older, beautiful, and talented sister, Margaret. The novel builds suspense as we watch Nico's drift dangerously toward an inappropriate relationship with Aaron, her dead sister's boyfriend. Originally the two come together to help each other deal with their grief, but the relationship turns strange, disturbing, and unhealthy. Many times, I found myself unable to put the book down fearing that Nico was drifting into harm's way.

I've enjoyed a number of Francine Prose's novels. A year ago, I reviewed her nonfiction work, "Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them" and I gave that book a strong five-star Amazon rating. Prose is an accomplished writer--I can count on her to deliver a finely crafted work of literary fiction. That said, I was definitely disappointed with this work. Don't get me wrong: I did enjoy it...but, for me, it only earned a three-star rating. I felt strongly that something was missing, and it took me a while to figure it out.

I've waited for over a week to write this review, I needed to sort out where this book failed me. The writing was excellent; the characterizations, extraordinary--in fact, I can still conjure up vivid images of the main character, Nico, her mother, father, sister, and a host of other lesser characters. Prose made these people real in my mind, and that is no small accomplishment. The story is not complex--it is realistic in the extreme, almost pedestrian. That's okay, too. I'm one of those readers who actually yearn for novels with outstanding characterization and slim realistic plots. So what was it that failed me here with this lovely, subtle coming-of-age book about grief and identity? In the end, it was the lack of any deeper meaning--the lack of overarching revealing themes about the truth of the human condition. The authors tells the story well, but leaves it up to her readers to derive whatever meaning they may discover within the story. In a work of popular fiction, that's okay, but in a work of literary fiction, I expected the author to take greater risks delivering, from within the body of the story, sparkling intellectual depth and insight about human nature.

Perhaps my disappointment was exaggerated because I read another books recently with a strikingly similar storyline about a young girl dealing with grief, sexual awakening, and inappropriate relationships--one that left a far stronger impression on me, and was in many ways in my estimation, a better book. That novel was "The God of Animals: A Novel" by Aryn Kyle--a debut novel that won a solid four-star rating from me. The author's overarching themes about the reality of the human condition at the end of this novel seared their way into my heart and soul--I found my eyes brimming with tears because of the honesty and clarity of the vision...and I am one not easily moved by sentiment. I suppose I expected something like this from Prose's book and was deeply disappointed when it was not there.

Of special note, Prose does an outstanding job of recreating the progression into and out of psychological depression. But again, for me, the author misses the mark: she gets the description right, but fails to reveal any insight--there are no stunning interior revelations.

Although I enjoyed "Goldengrove," I do not recommend it: there are better books being published that deserve your time. But I'll still keep an eye out for Francine Prose's next novel, and when it appears, I will probably fall in line to buy it and read it.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Susan Y. Schoonover (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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.