Customer Reviews

The Other Side of Air: A Novel

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Jeanne Braselton's The Other Side of Air is a book of simple prose that leaves you aching to believe that our loved ones continue to care for us after their deaths.

Katy and Ephraim Doyal have been in love since they were eight years old. Their marriage was a long and happy one but when Katy realized she is going to die and leave Ephraim alone she arranges for him to be cared for by a woman, Rose Callahan, she meet only once during her last hospital stay.

Just prior to her death, Katy writes a letter to Rose anticipating not only Ephraim needs but the suspicion that Katy and Ephraim's son will have of Rose herself and how to deal with each issue.

Rose, who I believe would have been content to care for Ephraim for the same minimal wage she receives at her three jobs, greatly benefits from Katy's insight and compassion. By the arrangement she made with Rose, Katy lifts her out of stark poverty and loneliness. Ephraim and Rose are not romantically intimate but Rose's loneliness is abated by being needed and having the ability to know how to help.

Katy's after death conversations with her family raised they age old question. Can we communicate with our deceased loved ones? Normally, my answer to that question is "no" but The Other Side of Air opened my mind to the possibility.

I found this book hard to read. The style of the prose was, at times, very confusing. I am a native southerner and people down south don't speak like the characters in this book. I love southern novels but this one just didn't deliver for me. I just couldn't get into the characters of this story. I was very disappointed since I had to special order this book.

This was a book about a woman who died and was watching things from "the other side of air" as the title suggests. I felt that the writing was stilted, and while it was a relatively short novel, I felt as if I had to force myself to turn each page. The most interesting part of the book, in my opinion, was the relationship between the son and his father. The son had never felt close to his parents because they, having loved each other since age eight, had an all consuming relationship, and he felt left out. Because of this, he was emotionally stilted, and this came through in the relationship he had with his parents as well as his wife. If the author had taken the relationship of Wyatt, the son, to another level, I feel that this would have been a much better novel. Instead, we get a rather silly story with Katy watching everything and talking with the other characters from beyond the grave. The story itself was rather boring and dry, and I felt that the characters were pretty flat. In fact, I didn't even feel as if the characters even grew in the story. Unfortunately, the author passed away before the novel was finished, so it was finished by her friend, Kaye Gibbons. I feel that Kaye Gibbons is a great author, and her afterward was the best part of the book.

Author Jeanne Braselton hadn't finished her second novel, The Other Side of Air, before her death in 2003. Kaye Gibbons, a close friend, agreed to complete it for her.

Katy Doyal met her husband, Ephraim, soon after she had moved from Athens, Georgia to Rome, Georgia. She was eight years old and even then she knew she loved him. Their love was special and only for the two of them. It even excluded their son, Wyatt and has hampered his own marriage.

Katy learns she is going to die and worries that Ephraim will die of loneliness after she's gone. But Katy has a plan. She enlists the aid of Rose Callahan, a middle-aged, loud woman, to become a companion to Ephraim. From her grave, Katy talks to her husband and son and wishes for a reconciliation between the two of them.

I love Southern novels. They always seem to invite you in and ask you to stay a spell. And when it's time to go, you don't want to. The Other Side of Air was such a nice visit that I wanted to stay a lot longer. I wanted so much more of the characters lives. And Katy, well even in death, is a force.

Armchair Interviews says: True love, reconciliation, getting old and dying; it's all here and it will make you think about your own life.