Customer Reviews

Goldengrove Unleaving

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The correction:
This volume, combining Walsh's 1972 YA novel _Goldengrove_ with its 1976 sequel _Unleaving_, is described on the author's website as "1997, Black Swan, reissue as adult fiction". Both titles, and the name of the female protagonist Madge (short for Margaret), evoke Gerard Manley Hopkins's famous poem "Spring and Fall: to a young child" ([...]) with its opening lines

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?

As the cover clearly shows and the author's own website states, the title of this volume is not _Goldengrove *and* Unleaving_ but _Goldengrove Unleaving_, as in the poem.
(ADDED: I submitted this as a correction to Amazon, and it should be live on the page by ca. Jan. 31, 2012.)

The partial review:
(Disclosure: I have just finished _Goldengrove_; _Unleaving_ is waiting on the shelf.)

Paton presents two cousins, Madge and Paul, who have known each other all their lives but see each other only when visiting their grandmother in summer. She moves freely between their points of view (and grandmother's, when she's in the scene), as we see their mixed feelings toward each other. Paton's lyrical prose shows each scene in its sensual richness. Here is a moment near the shore: "They are nearly at the lizard den. A remembered-from-last-year place with a tumble of rocks and flat stones topping the cliff, with scrubby heather and furze growing there, and the fleshy-fingered sea carrot, smelling of school-dinner salad, and the tough stemmed clumps of wiry thrift, and the little butter-yellow bird's-foot trefoil growing bright against stone and grass. The bees hum loudly there, and the lizards bask and blink on the lichen-blotched, sun-baked stones, and then scurry away into dark crevices, with a dry scuttering rustle on the stones."

It's clear that Madge and Paul are attracted to each other through long acquaintance and knowledge, and dawning puberty. What is also clear to the reader before long, from Grandmother's memories, is what they don't know: that they are not cousins, but brother and sister.

_Unleaving_ won the Boston Globe/Horn Book prize in 1976.