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The Quickening

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THE QUICKENING

The span of years from 1913 till 1950 are reminisced by two characters, neighbors Enidina Current and Mary Morrow. The two women tell us the stories of their lives as neighbors living on farms in the Midwest. One would think these two women living miles from civilization would be thick as thieves and happy to have each other for company, but the fact of the matter is, these two women never form a friendly relationship.

Enidina -- called Eddie by her husband -- is in love with her new husband, Frank, and happy and content to be a farm wife. Living and working a farm is never easy, but back in the early 1900's this life is unforgiving and hard. Enidina is a large and tough woman having been raised doing farm work a man would do. This is the life for her and she is more than satisfied working the land with Frank.

Mary, on the other hand, comes from a well-to-do family. Living the life of a farmer's wife is not quite what she had in mind. However, she takes what she can get in the way of marriage and travels where her vows take her. Due to ugly circumstances when she was a young girl, Mary and her parents were suddenly and forever ostracized by the town. Mary and her husband, Jack, move to the farm close to Enidina and Frank.

The two women meet and a friendship of sorts is established albeit not warm and friendly. They are not friends -- they are only neighbors. Anyone living in a neighborhood can attest to that fact -- there are neighbors who are neighbors and there are neighbors who are friends. There is a difference. However, in times of strife, they are there for each other.

Mary and Enidina both tell their stories, both of their lives entwined with the others. Each woman takes a turn chapter by chapter telling their tales. Babies are born, families are raised, relationships are put at risk, both friendship wise and in their marriages. We are taken to town, meet the minister who has such an influence over one of the women, travel through the Great Depression and the effect that takes on the farmers and the consequences of one horrible afternoon.

We are in the minds of Enidina and Mary, we know their most private thoughts, their fears, loves, hates, with them as they try to make it through life, no matter what.

This was a good book, an achievement for first time author Michelle Hoover. Hoover makes you feel the sometimes desperation of these housewives, their love for their children, their hopes and dreams, so many of which are smashed into pieces. We are in the middle of the uneasy relationship between Mary and Enidina and how that not quite friendship is finally and brutally torn apart. We suffer their losses and cheer them on when they achieve some small success.

Hoover has a way with words so you can feel the unrelenting heat of the Midwest sun, hear the birds singing, the cows enjoying their days, the hard and nasty task of butchering days on the farm. You can feel the dust on your body, the bites of the bugs, the uncomfortable hot nights trying to rest so you can get up and do it all over again and again and again, trying to raise some crops and trying to keep your family together and maybe find a little happiness for yourself.

Thank you!

Pam

Michelle Hoover sat me at the kitchen tables of her characters in her stunning novel, The Quickening, and served me a slice of the human condition I will never forget.

Her book is a brutally honest narrative of Edwina Current and Mary Morrow, neighbors who are thrown together because of their need for companionship on the isolated Midwest plains in the early 20th century. In it we hear out-of-tune piano music in a tiny church; we smell the blood of the slaughtered sow; we feel the singe of a prairie fire. The birth of a child, the harvest of a crop, a successful batch of pancakes - nothing could be taken for granted for these women.

For those of us accustomed to supermarkets, air conditioners and cell phones, it is an uncomfortable read. Convenience and connectedness were hard to come by the characters in Michelle Hoover's story. However, the deeper I dove into The Quickening, the more I realized the story was real and profoundly important. I couldn't stop turning the pages of this exquisitely written novel. I deeply respect Ms. Hoover's courage in telling a tale of isolation, loss, betrayal and desperation on the unforgiving land her characters long to tame.

Most highly recommended. An excellent book for book club discussions.
Reviewed by Holly Weiss, author of Crestmont

"The Quickening," Michelle Hoover's debut novel, is absolutely stunning, a unique and tragic and heartbreaking story, told in the alternating voices of Enidina and Mary, "neighbors," if you will, on adjoining farms in the Midwest, the actual location never named, but, no matter; from the start, the year 1915, and to the end, l950, the reader is introduced to these two women and the reluctant relationship the one forms with the other. Enidina, keeping a journal that might one day enlighten a grandson she has never known, a grandson who might not even have survived his birth but for whom she "searches" in the faces of children of his approximate age, details her story, through the author's hand, portraying a life of hardship, personal sacrifice, the intense labor of making a go of something in the farmlands of the Midwest. On finishing the book, I looked back to find a few lines that struck me in particular, when Enidina writes, "My boy, you may not understand how awful this waiting (for the birth of a child) was. In those years, you never could be sure of a child, no matter how soon in coming. And you never took for granted what a birth might cost the mother herself." In gorgeous story-telling and drawing on a journal kept by her own great-grandmother, Michelle brings to life a time and a place, and peoples the landscape with such memorable characters. Today it's easy to lose sight, with all we have, with all we take for granted, of just how difficult it was, beginning a life with little and working so hard to make a life of some profit and comfort. The setbacks, the heartbreak, those rarer moments of joy...they are all here for the reader to not so much "enjoy" but to learn from. I wonder...could there be a prequel or a sequel, somehow, for, in typing this review, I'm reluctant to let it all go. You've provided a remarkable reading experience for us, Michelle Hoover. I, for one, look forward to what comes next.

Enidina Current and Mary Morrow are farm wives and neighbors separated by more than fences that define a common property line. In the rural and sparsely settled mid-west early in the last century the two women are destined to endure a troubled relationship for some thirty-seven-years.

City-born Mary is unsuited for farm life--shocked in fact at the beginning of her marriage that her quick-to-anger husband has brought her to such a place. Enidina, however, is a large, sturdy woman who has known nothing else her entire life and is grateful that she and her husband are able to own their own farm. Neither woman understands the other. And yet, without other close neighbors, they are thrown together and at times must rely on one another.

Enidina, blessed with a loving husband is content, especially when she gives birth to twins after several miscarriages. Mary, however, is never truly happy. Already the mother of two young sons when the novel begins, Mary's past holds secrets from childhood that strain her marriage. When she gives birth to a third son, fathered not by her husband but by the local minister, her marriage suffers and her husband's temper flares often.

Real trouble begins between the families during the depression years with government price-support programs causing the disposal of healthy livestock. But worse is to come, resulting in heartbreak for both women and due in large part to Mary's misguided effort to clear her youngest son of responsibility for a tragic accident.

I have mixed feelings about this novel. The premise of two women, so different, thrown together but never true friends is an appealing idea for a book. Add the period spanning the depression era and it was a novel I couldn't resist. But somewhere, on some level at least, the book is flawed in my opinion. I loved the author's descriptions, which she pared to the bone but made more visual than had she used more description. But it is not an especially easy book to read and I never really warmed to either woman even though I felt I should have felt more for Enidina.

I'm not sure why the book didn't do more for me but I often laid it aside for several days before picking it up again. I wonder if this was because the story told by Enidina was her journal account for a grandchild she never knew interrupted by Mary's first-person account of the same years and events. Also, at times my enjoyment was hampered by questions alluded to but never fully answered. Still, there is much to recommend the work.

The Quickening, at its core, is about the intersecting lives of two women - the stoic and large-boned Edinina Current who grew up on the farm and knows the virtues of working hard, and her less adaptable neighbor Mary Morrow, who crumples under the isolation of the rural farmland.

One part literary, one part gothic, one part historical, it is, in essence, an exploration of a symbiotic relationship between mismatched women who have no choice but to cling to each other for companionship and survival. Edinina keeps a stiff upper lip despite poverty, miscarriages, and the brutality of farm life. Mary goes through the motions of a day-to-day existence with three young sons and an abusive husband and succumbs to an elusive local preacher.

The two key characters trade narration with each chapter, beginning in 1913 and closing in the winter of 1950, often correcting or adding to each other's interpretation of events. Their lives are circumscribed: "...it was hard to be certain of anything outside our own hundred and eighty acres of land." And indeed, Michelle Hoover appears to know the cadence and rhythm and dreariness and isolation and joy of farm life very well. The descriptions of the farm ring of stark authenticity.

As the reader will immediately suspect, intertwined and guarded lives with little in common like Edidina's and Mary's are headed nowhere good. There will be accidents and betrayals and madness and despair and jealousies. The Great Depression will introduce another element of uncertainty into already fragile lives: Agriculture Secretary Wallace's demand to destroy livestock in exchange for reimbursement (which could have been explained better) will pit family against family.

There were many times that I wished this debut book had been written in third person instead of first person; observations and perceptions and self-analysis would have flowed more organically. The writing is taut - at times, too taut - and there are hints of themes that play out beautifully in C.E. Morgan's All The Living. Yet when the denouement comes at the end, it is nevertheless surprising and sad.

The dark secrets that these women hold - that they MUST hold in order to survive - eventually reveal themselves as they struggle to find the inner strength that's necessary for resiliency and sacrifice. At the end, the reader understands anew about the drive for self-preservation even in the worst of circumstances...perhaps, a theme for our times.

This is not going to be one of those books that you run to for an uplifting experience, Enidina (Eddie) Current and Mary Morrow are two very different women living quiet desperate lives from 1913 to 1950. Being farm wives and living far from town, they are the only neighbor that the other has and you could not find any two different people.

I found myself liking one character more than the other, not sure if that was the writer intention, but Eddie's character was so much more for me then just a character in a book. She became real and her loves and her passions would just jump off the page and talk to me in a way that a character has not in a very long time.

Mary on the other hand was too tense. She was not cut out to be a farm wife and you could tell from the moment that she first spoke that she was not going to be, for me, a likeable character. Coming from a well to do family and having been run out of town as a young girl, Mary continued to have an edge that by the end of the book might not have been worn smooth.

In alternating chapters, Mary and Enidina tell their stories and how their lives, from the moment they met, would intertwine. Each takes the hard knocks differently, from new marriages, to childbirth, to the great depression, to the death of loved ones; these two women have been through it all and come out bruised and battered in a way that will leave an indelible mark on the reader.
Though I would not call this a depressing book, at the same time, I would not call it a book of hope. These are hard times that the women have lived through and each has come out more shattered than whole.

A memorable story has been told, a story that will resonate and will honor the physical and emotional hardships that women have faced and survived.

Hoover's novel is a searing and stark description of the lives of two women who inhabit neighboring farms in Iowa. She spins a tale of life in a farming community during the early part of the twentieth century, including the Great Depression and its aftermath. When I finished this book, I was almost numb with sadness. I felt I really knew the characters by then, and yet they were so complex that they remained somewhat mysterious to me, even at the end of the book. The ribbons are not all tied up. This book is not easily forgotten. I would not recommend it to those who only like books with happy endings and moral simplicity. Be prepared to be stirred and troubled by this book.

Michelle Hoover's masterful debut novel, "The Quickening," recounts the lives of two women who share love and hatred over a 25-year span bracketed by World Wars I and II. Hoover's gift for poetic compression renders Enidina Current and Mary Morrow with tremendous emotional depth, while evoking a time and a place - the rural Midwest in the early 20th century - that seem at once familiar and utterly foreign. I was riveted by the distinct voices of Enidina and Mary, and amazed by Hoover's ability to describe heightened emotional states without ever backing away from conflict. Hats off to Michelle Hoover for an auspicious debut!

This novel follows the lives of two women living on adjacent farms on the Great Plains during the Great Depression. Enidina and Mary, two very different women, are brought together by geography, but have little else in common. Enidina's life is filled with sorrows, but Mary has little ability to empathize. Mary, while devoutly religious, is convinced in the ultimate rightness of her actions, even when those actions are questionable or self-serving. Meanwhile, Enidina is the very definition of Christian patience. She takes death, poverty, and the hardships of farm life with a quiet patience and stoicism.

This was quite an interesting book, though it was rather slow to start. I found the characters somewhat difficult to get to know, living out the image of the taciturn Midwesterner. I also found the format to be a bit clunky; much of the book is written as Enidina's letters to her grandson. The end of the book is quite good. Hoover has captured a particular type of character, the strong Midwestern farm wife, brilliantly.

The Quickening concerns itself with the relationship between two farm wives in the Midwest in the years before and during the Great Depression. One, Enidinia, doesn't think much of herself in some basic ways--she knows she is large, unfeminine, and not much of a homemaker. But she has tremendous strength and good instincts, and she does value her own way with other living things; she knows how to take care of her livestock, how to be married to a good man, and how to handle children. Her neighbor Mary is a woman of tremendous disattachment. She is disappointed by life early, and withdraws into her large home, depleted, exhausted, and disconnected from her husband and sons. These women are forced by circumstance and proximity to be important in each others lives, despite how different they are.

A traditional story, I believe, would concern itself with how these women broke down the barriers of background, faith and economics that separated them, and forged a bond. Well, that is not The Quickening. This is a story of missed connections, of two women doing what they must for each other because of their isolation from everyone else. Mary is a difficult character to like, and the prose style doesn't help. She is so delusional that her real stories are not revealed until the end of the book, after a lot of glancing approaches to them that leave a reader frustrated. Enidinia is in her own way just as oblique, sort of mutely deflecting most of her pain onto the landscape. The lack of connection between these women is frustrating, not just for them, but for the reader.

So what makes the book worthwhile? The writing, for one. If you love densely literary prose that reads as poetry, you will love this (I did). The life and landscape of the prairie is there in all its seasons, from the clinging dust of the summer to the bitterness of the winter. The daily lives of women, feeding the stove, tending to the animals, putting something on the table, these are perfectly portrayed. And the key role of religion and the church in the life of a farm woman is also explored well. The side characters are luminously real, and the betrayals and differences mount to a very sad but oddly satisfying conclusion that echoes the preceeding story; but thankfully, there is some hope in it, some promise that at least two of the characters were not completely broken by what went on between Mary and Enidinia.

So this is highly recommended for readers who love a nice, bleak literary novel with flashes of poetry.