Veena’s review of A Long Time Gone by Karen White
Women’s Fiction published by Penguin Group 3 Jun 14
This is a heart-breaking novel of broken dreams and redemption with big-as-life characters who sucked me into their crushed hopes and wouldn’t let me go. There are times during the book that I felt I could not bear to continue, but then curiosity won out and kept me reading late into the night. The book spans three generations of women who narrate their stories against a backdrop of prohibition, discrimination, the Ku Klux Klan, and drugs as the author seamlessly switches between time periods and narrators.
At the core of the story and almost a character by itself is the house that has outlasted generations of owners and nature’s force and fury.
Adelaid lost her mother at an early age when she committed suicide, fortunately leaving her in the care of an aunt and uncle who loved her and gave her the care and nurturing that perhaps her own parent wouldn’t have been able to. She was fortunate to have a happy upbringing and a marriage filled with love. When it seemed like her life was complete with a loving husband and a new-born baby, she got caught up in the crossfire of a power struggle, leaving behind a legacy of heartache and abandonment that her descendants struggled to rise above.
Carol Lyn was a rebellious teenager who wanted something beyond the small town where she was raised and the restrictions her loving mother imposed on her lifestyle, so she left the safe haven of her home to look over the horizon for something that she could never find. Being a flower child, she lived stoned out of her mind most of her life and drifted through various male lovers. The one constant in her life was her home and mother, with whom she left her children because she knew that her mother would give them the love that she herself was incapable of, and so she, in turn, “abandoned” them.
Her mother’s comings and goings left an indelible impression on Vivian, but Bootsie’s – her grandmother – love sustained her. Not content with what she had, she in turn left to seek wider horizons, which never materialized, so she covered her disappointment with substance abuse. Broken and at the end of her rope, she comes back home so her grandmother can fix everything, only to find her grandmother has passed, but Vivian’s old life is waiting for her, if she could only find herself again. Uncovering Adelaid’s skeleton gives her a purpose where she feels the answers behind Adelaid’s disappearance will fill the hole in her heart and give her a means to move on as a whole person.
Vivian’s relationship with her brother, her mother, her stepdaughter, and her erstwhile best friend, wanna be love Tripp, are penned with a skill that fully engage the reader. Carol Lyn, who’s now struggling with Alzheimer’s, has lucid mothering moments that have an impact on the young, impressionable Chloe, while Vivian continues to be somewhat unforgiving and impervious. This is definitely not a light-hearted story, nor is it for the faint of heart, but it captured me such that I found myself white knuckled and praying for positive outcomes for Vivian several times throughout the story.
Grade: B
Summary:
“We Walker women were born screaming into this world, the beginning of a lifelong quest to find what would quiet us. But whatever drove us away was never stronger than the pull of what brought us back….”
When Vivien Walker left her home in the Mississippi Delta, she swore never to go back, as generations of the women in her family had. But in the spring, nine years to the day since she’d left, that’s exactly what happens—Vivien returns, fleeing from a broken marriage and her lost dreams for children.
What she hopes to find is solace with “Bootsie,” her dear grandmother who raised her, a Walker woman with a knack for making everything all right. But instead she finds that her grandmother has died and that her estranged mother is drifting further away from her memories. Now Vivien is forced into the unexpected role of caretaker, challenging her personal quest to find the girl she herself once was.
But for Vivien things change in ways she cannot imagine when a violent storm reveals the remains of a long-dead woman buried near the Walker home, not far from the cypress swamp that is soon to give up its ghosts. Vivien knows there is now only one way to rediscover herself—by uncovering the secrets of her family and breaking the cycle of loss that has haunted them for generations.
