Publishers Weekly
07/20/2020
Hall’s powerful if uneven debut novel (after the memoir Without a Map), follows a close-knit farming family through the aftermath of the family’s oldest son’s death in 1948 Maine. Thomas “Tup” Senter; his wife, Doris; and their children, Sonny, Dodie, and Beston, operate a dairy farm that has been in Tup’s family for five generations. After Sonny, 14, is accidentally killed while the siblings are playing with an old gun, Tup, Dodie, and Beston carry on despite their grief, while Doris, once energetic and loving, is overwhelmed by loss and guilt, and slips into an emotional paralysis. Tup copes by working nights at a mill, and after several years begins sleeping with the widowed mill owner. Dodie, left to watch over Beston and do Doris’s work rather than enjoy her high school years, cycles between anger and her deep love for her family and their farm. Hall takes her time getting things moving and oversells the idyllic state of the Senters before Sonny’s death. Still, her meticulous prose convincingly captures the daily realities—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel—of agricultural life, and offers insight into the ways calamity fractures family bonds. Patient readers will be rewarded. Agent: Jennifer Gates, Aevitas Creative. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
“As organically as it traveled to heartbreak, Beneficence progresses to the place of wisdom that lies beyond it, where we learn that a home is part of the ‘vast world of innocence and harm,’ not an island beyond it.”—Wall Street Journal
“People stay together, fall apart, come back together, altered. It is a book about work, about grief, about thick ongoing love. Hall’s prose is hewn, sinewy, with moments of electrifying beauty and grace.”—Boston Globe
“Beneficence is a book with so much tenderness, heart, authenticity and wisdom. I know I will read it again.”—Joyce Maynard, New York Times bestselling author
“These voices from the past speak so clearly to our time, at a moment when many of us wonder whether we’ll lose the things that we consider blessings....Beneficence is a quiet but steady book, one that echoes ancient and important rhythms.”—Washington Post
“A quiet gem of a first novel. The author's lyrical prose and stark portrayal of grief and guilt…is conveyed so movingly this story is hard to put down. With language poetic in its cadence and capable of seamlessly transporting our minds and emotions to another place and time, this accomplished debut will be welcomed by readers of authors such as Willa Cather, Alice Munro, Amy Tan, or Lisa See.”—Library Journal
“Spare but decked with moments of crystalline beauty.... A family flounders in grief, but finds their way home through forgiveness and acceptance, in Beneficence, Meredith Hall’s gorgeous and moving new novel.”—Foreword, starred review
“Powerful…[Hall's] meticulous prose convincingly captures the daily realities—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel—of agricultural life, and offers insight into the ways calamity fractures family bonds...readers will be rewarded.”—Publishers Weekly
“An emotional journey so deep into the lives of others, you will find yourself, and the people you love, staring back with a face for each of Meredith Hall’s characters. One of the best books I’ve ever read, this quiet, family saga—a masterpiece of compassion and objectivity—has changed the way I see everyone around me, forever.”—Simon Van Booy
“This fiercely beautiful novel took hold of me from the very first page. Beneficence is at once a page-turner and an artistic triumph. Meredith Hall takes on the old universal truths, as Faulkner once put it: love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. I loved this book, and will be thinking about the Senter family for a long time to come.”—Dani Shapiro
“If the word ‘luminous’ didn’t already exist, you’d have to invent it to describe Meredith Hall’s radiant new novel Beneficence.”—Richard Russo
“Beneficence is a beautiful novel, quiet and meditative, exquisite in its language, moving in its emotional reach. It delivers a particular time and presence—a Maine farm in the 1950s—with deep love and understanding. This book is like a communion with the land.”—Roxana Robinson
“In the style of Marilynne Robinson and Stewart O'Nan, Hall writes with quiet urgency, drawing us close to the broken heart of one family's unspeakable loss. Hauntingly beautiful, emotionally devastating, and infused with great compassion, Beneficence shines a light on that liminal space between hate and affection, fate and freewill, mercy and grace—and the power we have to redeem or destroy those we love the most.”—Kim Barnes
“Beneficence is amazing in its vision. Luminous. With wisdom and compassion, Meredith Hall writes about the capacity for atonement. Beneficence, then. Goodness. Generosity to see deeply, to live through fear and pain on your journey toward the awareness of splendor.”—Ursula Hegi
“All novels are instruction kits for how they must be read. Meredith Hall’s novel Beneficence is forceful in this way and uniquely fruitful. Beneficence will remind a reader of Willa Cather in that it instructs us to savor life, to set aside our cold spirit, to notice human beings closely and tenderly, and to believe that telling life plainly is a virtue which can achieve beauty.”—Richard Ford
Library Journal
08/14/2020
[DEBUT] Best-selling memoirist Hall (Without a Map) has written a quiet gem of a first novel. Following the lives of the Senter family—Tup, his wife, Doris, and their children—from the midst of the Great Depression until 1960, the narrative evokes the patterns of life on the Senter dairy farm. The farm itself becomes a character in the quotidian joys and sorrows of the clan. Thus, when their lives are shattered by a terrible accident, the business suffers, then becomes a refuge, and, ultimately, a place of healing. The author's lyrical prose and stark portrayal of the grief and guilt carried by Tup and Doris, the way it affects them both and their family, is conveyed so movingly this story is hard to put down. VERDICT With language poetic in its cadence and capable of seamlessly transporting our minds and emotions to another place and time, this accomplished debut will be welcomed by readers of authors such as Willa Cather, Alex Munro, Amy Tan, or Lisa See.—Pamela O'Sullivan, Coll. at Brockport Lib., SUNY
MARCH 2021 - AudioFile
Narrators Cassandra Campbell, Tom Taylorson and Rachel Jacobs channel each member of the close-knit Senter family. Their stunning performances will put listeners in the heart of the family before, during, and after the tragedy that changes its members forever. In individual first-person monologues, Doris, Tup, and their child Dodie make life on their small Maine farm sound like it’s full of hard work and love. Spanning the years from 1933 to the 1960s, Campbell, as Doris, sounds worried about her children even when there’s no reason to worry; Taylorson, as Tup, delivers a practical, earthy man; and Jacobs presents Dodie, a bright, articulate, and poetic child. This beautiful, haunting story, performed with sensitivity, is best enjoyed on audio. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
