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In her eighth novel, Orange Prize–winning novelist Helen Dunmore creates a vivid, moving portrait of a young woman's attempt to reclaim both her past and future. Abandoned as a newborn and raised in a cold adoptive family, Rebecca has grown up with no history to call her own. She feels the blankness of her past, having nothing to treasure but the size 11 shoebox in which she was found and vague reports of her mother's shadowy shape fleeing the scene of her abandonment.
Her best friend, Joe, a writer, creates alternative histories for Rebecca in which he imagines her mother and the circumstances of Rebecca's birth. Through Joe she meets and marries Adam and gives birth to a red-haired daughter named Ruby. With every passing year, Rebecca's desperate need for family is happily fulfilled -- until a freak accident irrevocably changes her dyllic life. Lost, alone, and unmoored by grief, Rebecca finds that she must try to reconnect with her many histories before she can find the strength to forge a new future for herself. Original, imaginative, and totally distinctive, this novel -- with its poignant themes of love, loss, and redemption -- is sure to delight Dunmore's legions of fans.
Publishers Weekly
This is that rare novel, an intensely emotional, fiercely intelligent story, fiction with the power to offer redemption.
Library Journal
Part of growing up is learning the story of your life and your family, but for Rebecca there is no story. She was abandoned as a baby in a shoebox and later adopted by parents who really wanted a boy. When she grows up, she tries to create her story by starting her own family. After she marries Adam and gives birth to their precious daughter, Ruby, Rebecca has the life that she never had growing up. Adam is a successful neonatologist, and she is a happy homemaker. Then tragedy strikes, and all that she has gained is lost in one devastating moment. Rebecca and Adam drift apart, and she gets a job as a personal assistant to a successful hotelier. She flies all over the world setting up hotels for him until one day she has a vision that causes her to rethink the last three years of her life and what her future holds. Dunmore, who in 1996 became the first winner of England's prestigious Orange Prize for A Spell of Winter, has written an elegantly interwoven tale of past and present. The characters' lives and stories wrap together to create an intriguing, well-written work about family, love, tragedy, and friendship. Recommended for most public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/03.]-Robin Nesbitt, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OH Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Award-winning British novelist Dunmore (Ice Cream, 2003, etc.) tracks the rollercoaster ride of a young woman from nothingness to identity, a journey she is fated to repeat. In 1965, newborn Rebecca's mother abandons her in a shoebox behind an Italian restaurant. The kitchen help find her before the rats, and she is passed on to adoptive parents who feed her but forget to love her. Haunted by the void in her past, Rebecca must wait until she is grown to find salvation in two men. Joe, who's writing a book about Stalin's second wife that eventually becomes a bestseller, is her empathetic roommate, the brother she has never had. His equally attentive friend Adam, a doctor whose specialty is premature babies, becomes Rebecca's husband, and her adult identity is complete when she gives birth to Ruby. Life is wonderful until five-year-old Ruby dies in a car accident and Rebecca regresses to "the habit of nothing." She and Adam separate, but she encounters a third unconventional savior, Mr. Damiano, a circus impresario turned hotelier who places absolute trust in her abilities as his personal assistant. Meanwhile, Joe, who has never forgotten Rebecca's need for ancestors, is writing a story to erase her fixation on that wretched shoebox. In his work-in-progress, set in France in 1917, single mother Florence vows never to abandon her daughter, even if it means working in a brothel close to the front. Joe's story is both echo chamber and harbinger: Florence shields her child from hostile aircraft just as Rebecca had once dreamed of shielding Ruby from traffic, while the brothel's attic bedroom will find its counterpart in the attic bedroom that reunites Adam and Rebecca. The layered narrativesomewhat muffles the impact of Rebecca's emotional death and rebirth, but Dunmore's eighth novel still offers plenty of incidental pleasures. Agent: Caradoc King
AUG/SEP 04 - AudioFile
An abandoned baby, Rebecca’s story begins in a shoe box outside an Italian restaurant. Without family or history, even as an adult she’s just a soul afloat in the world. First to anchor her is her friend Joe, a historian, who, absorbed in creating her history, abandons his passion for Stalin. He introduces her to Adam, a neonatologist, whom she marries. When their child, Ruby, unexpectedly dies, Rebecca’s haunting narrative is once again cast adrift, fragmenting and blending with the stories of others tangentially connected to her. Virginia Leishman’s soft, skillful reading holds this complex work together. Her direct and forceful narration, with its rich, precise intonations, weaves Rebecca’s fragments into an emerging tapestry. Finally, the reader is reminded that, though past is often prologue, it is, after all, only prologue. Rebecca’s real story is what she herself has fashioned from the shoe box and Ruby’s death. P.E.F. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
