Gray

by Dawn Moore Roy

Overview

GRAY is a viscerally lush, sometimes playful, and unflinching exploration of loss, divorce, midlife sexuality, and the search for fulfillment, even in the face of death.

Vera Mine has a big problem. An ordinary middle-aged white American woman, Vera is a realist, yet fragile: unable to sugarcoat and always fighting the demons that question what she sees, what needs to be done. Unknowingly, she wants to be a modern-day interpretation of the Greek Goddess Athena. However, unlike Athena, with her crown of flowers and natural ability to judge and take action, everything Vera sees around her is gray, never even slightly black or white. She struggles to speak up, change the course of events, and considers herself a coward. Vera surrounds herself with paralyzing clouds of Gray.

Vera Mine's father is dying. She sits beside his hospital bed and watches the parade of people come and go. Only a few are his travelers, the people he holds close as he passes on. Faced with questions of meaning and mortality, Vera reflects on her life and the travelers she has encountered on the way. Finally, she understands what she, and people like her, need to experience a satisfying life and a good death, or as good as a death can be. After her father's funeral and still mending, Vera surprises her friends and family when she sets out with great gusto on a mission to fulfill her newly realized needs and makes her home on the honeyed Greek island of Naxos.

In a place where everyone is a stranger, Vera finally has the opportunity to look inward and explore her creativity. She forges connections and is treated as an honored guest by a local family, who become part of her everyday life. But the tranquility doesn't last. She immediately falls for Demetri, the island demigod, and finds herself caught up in hurtful lies and shocking secret plans that threaten to upend the idyllic island town. Soon she will be confronted with a choice to remain, once again, on the sidelines or make a judgment and find the courage within herself to act.

In her exciting debut novel, Roy weaves a brilliant narrative latticework in striking prose with measured surprises of lovely lyricism. The narration takes readers on an intimate ride in and out of Vera's thoughts as she confronts and attempts to understand death, doubt, her cowardice, judgment, her midlife sexuality, and the amazing power of humility.

Giving Back

​​​​​​​20% of all royalties from hardcover book sales will be donated to the Worldwide Fistula Fund. Learn more at https://worldwidefistulafund.org/.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781737516613
Publisher:	wrirer
Publication date:	07/27/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	861 KB

About the Author

Dawn Roy has been a home engineer for most of her life, managing a ménage of various biped and quadruped creatures. Her writing began decades ago with daily (almost) entries into her very personal journals. Along the way she became afflicted by the psychiatric disorder of aspiring to be a writer and after staring at stacks and stacks of annual diaries, her illness developed, leading her to complete a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh, where a special professor cured her by saying, "Just write a damn book." So she did, and now feels ready to share it. Roy lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with her husband and their German Shepherd, Otto.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2021-10-18
This debut novel, set in New England and on the Greek island of Naxos, flirts with the bodice-ripper genre but then turns into something far different.

Vera Mine, a young 55, is sitting near her dying father, Warren, in a Massachusetts hospital room in this tale’s opening scene. After an agonizing few days, Warren does die, leaving Vera drained and totally bereft. She is divorced and childless. She loved her husband, Max, but he left her and gained “a stereotypical trophy wife.” (The therapists all agreed that Vera’s resistance to sex was the problem.) Financially well off, she decides to go to Naxos. There, she hopes to recover from her grief and start anew, practicing her painting (she’s a creditable amateur) and remaining open to adventure. Naxos, of course, is that most romantic of places, conjuring up Zorba and numerous Greek island clichés. On the ferry from Athens, she meets the embodiment of it all: Demetri, a kind of dark-haired Greek Fabio. He is friendly; his English is better than her Greek; and he and his wife and children live close to her rented cottage. She is coming back to life and so is her libido. Demetri often comes over (how does he get his farming done?) and asks to borrow her laptop to “check his email.” Greece is grappling with the draconian measures that the European Union put in place to make the country pay off its debts. Demetri often rants about this fraught situation. After some months, the protagonist’s old friend Sean, who, as the buddy convention goes, knows Vera better than she knows herself, pays a visit. He messes around in her laptop and finds that things are very bad (and dangerous) indeed.Revealing further developments would spoil the story. That said, the ending delivers a delightful twist, an upsetting of expectations worthy of a mordant O. Henry. Roy is a very talented writer, often wickedly so, as when she describes Vera’s ditzy sister and her clueless uncle while Warren is dying (and the outrageous obit that these two write). Or Vera’s face-off with an officious dweeb in a dog park (she usually says fuckonly in her mind, but more and more she is shouting it at people who deserve it, a mark of her coming into her own). There are also moving, poetic passages on such unlikely things as hospital room numbers (“Suddenly, the numbers were briefly serene, leaned toward her, swaying: appealed to her humbly and modestly—gently asked her to stop, to please listen, to pause for a moment and rest, yes, rest”). In addition, the author deftly describes Demetri’s two kids. Vera is very perceptive, and it is clear that Elektra is Demetri’s favorite and that things are not well between Tasso and his father (as readers will see). Vera came to Greece steeped in its mythic history, enamored of Athena’s “metis.” Eventually, she will discover if she shares Athena’s “wisdom and cunning,” as most hold metisto mean. There are epigraphs heading the chapters, which tend to be short, and Roy keeps things moving along briskly. The point of view is Vera’s, third-person limited. Why it is not Vera, first person, will become quite apparent at the very end.

An impressive tale, wonderfully plotted and detailed, about a woman starting over.

Kirkus Reviews