Customer Reviews

Grand Ambition: A Novel

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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Grand Ambition is a story of fact and fiction woven together masterfully into a beautiful, honest portrayal of love and adventure. Lisa Michael's captures the awesome majesty of the Grand Canyon so completely I felt that I was with Bessie and Glen Hyde as they navigated their way down the Colorado. Despite knowing that they never achieve their "Grand Ambition," I was completely engrossed in seeing the newlyweds safely through each new hurdle. I loved this book so much I bought several more copies to give as presents and have told many others about it.

One of the best books I have read in the last few years!

I have never taken time to write a review before but feel compelled to spread the good word in this instance. A rare poetic adventure novel. This is a tremendous book, the story is captivating and the writing is lean and beautiful. I go out of my to recommend this novel to friends, family and passing acquaintances. As a previous boater on the Grand Canyon I was amazed by how true this felt; it is as good and evocative a description of the rapids and the canyon as I've ever read. This is a gem.

What a thrill to ride along with Bessie and Glen Hyde on their grand adventure down the Colorado River! In reimagining these real-life figures from the 1920s and their quest to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon, Michaels has written a suspenseful, exquisite novel. I was as swept away by Bessie and Glen's romance as by their heart-stopping--and ultimately, haunting--journey. I couldn't put the book down, and then I was sad for it to end. So I read it again.

Based on an intriguing premise, Grand Ambition is a novel I wanted to savor. But I couldn't, because once I started, I found myself turning the pages compulsively. This is a story that spawned it's own urban legends for more than 70 years. Newlyweds Glen and Bessie Hyde spend their honeymoon in 1928 shooting the rapids through the Grand Canyon on a scow designed by Glen, who has dreamed of this journey. Although Bessie has no experience, she has great enthusiasm and a willingness to take a bite out of what life has to offer her. They hope to set a record for speed, but if not that, then Bessie will be the first woman to successfully shoot the rapids. After the trip, they plan to lecture and write a book describing the adventure, using Bessie's skills as an artist to illustrate their story.

But something goes wrong. After a last sighting, the couple are never seen or heard from again. Glen's father, Hyde Sr., launches a rescue effort to discover the fate of his son and daughter-in-law, hoping to find them still alive. Mr. Hyde contacts everyone who has had contact with the young couple and religiously follows up every clue. When their scow is found floating lose with all necessary supplies still on board, the obvious becomes more and more ominous.

Michaels alternates chapters between the events as they happen to Bessie and Glen and the desperate rescue attempt by Glen's father, with a tension seesawing between hope and despair. The character of Bessie is finely tuned, her youth ultimately allowing fear to overshadow her expectations that Glen can really keep her safe on this increasingly terrifying dance over the whitecaps. Has Bessie put too much faith in Glen's strengths rather than her own? What if Glen, for all his brave posturing, is wrong?

The terrible truth is there from the beginning, but Michaels' characters, particularly Bessie and her father-in-law, are so courageous, so full of spirit, that the final pages come too soon. So little is really known about this couple and their fate that the author gives them voice and dreams, even those that shatter.

Lisa Michaels writes of marriage like few others. Her prose is free of cynicism, her impressionist sense of detail lucid and non-judgemental. Michael's memoir, Split, traced her parents marriages through the turbulence of sixties activism to the relative comfort of nineties repose. Lisa Michaels had been split, and something came up missing. Now, Grand Ambition offers us another marriage, that of Glen and Bessie Hyde. Not surprisingly, it is a union faced with grave danger, and one which braves a perilous course only to disappear without a trace. Michaels novel is at times serene and at times racked with violence, ever subject to the whims of the river. It is the author's instinctual knowledge of this natural flow that drives her prose. At no time do we forget the river is an agent of separation, the division between lands and peoples, and the beautiful thing powerful enough to take away everything.

Absolutely gorgeous prose! This seamless narrative drew me in from the first page. Lisa Michaels not only succeeds in resurrecting and imagining Glen and Bessie Hyde, two obscure historical figures, she also blesses them with beautifully felt inner lives and engaging dialogue. The author also accurately evokes the cultural climate of the 1920s as Glen and Bessie (like Lindbergh and others) dare to be swept away by an ebullient mood of possibility. I was struck by Glen and Bessie's straining human desire for both intimacy and immortality, two ideals that alternately draw them together and pull them apart throughout their journey. An inexorable fate pursues them down the harrowing straits of the Colorado River, and eventually claims them, but the reader is left to contemplate the idea that love, rather than ambition, demands the ultimate courage and sacrifice.

I've long admired the work of Lisa Michaels (Split: A Counterculture Childhood). This book, about the doomed trip of Bessie and Glen Hyde down the Colorado River in a home-made boat, could be called a real page turner except one wants to linger over the gorgeous sentences describing the Grand Canyon and the wild rapids. The novel richly paints an intimate portrait of two young people striving for a charmed life. If this novel doesn't garner some literary prize, the judges aren't paying close attention to the emergence of a very gifted writer.

The chief strength of this book is that it fictionally recreates the "missing" scenes from the fateful Colorado Rivery journey of Glenn and Bessie Hyde. However, Michaels apparently wrote her book before "Sunk Without a Sound" was published. If she had been able to read it first, numerous mistakes concerning known facts would have not been made.

The book was an entertaining fictional version of a true event, and I'm glad I read it. I enjoyed the story, knowing that much of it was speculation. It should have included a map. I plan to read "Sunk without a Sound" and think I will enjoy it more.

I could not put this book down after I started reading it. When I was not reading it, my mind was on it. It was so strange. I knew how it was going to end, but everything else to that point was a mystery. This is truly a book for today. You'll have to read the book to see what I mean. I will tell you that my thoughts are that it has to do with the state of the world today, which includes the 9-11-01 diaster. I had never heard of this author. Please don't let that influence your decision to read or not to read. She used a very ingenuous way of weaving three stories together. I am absolutely impressed.
Don't miss this one. You will be sorry!