Ann S. Epstein Writer

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Rating 5) – A Spirit Who Steals People’s Hearts. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout is nominally a short road trip that takes readers on a long journey. Ex-spouses but still good friends, Lucy Barton and William Gerhardt travel to Maine where he hopes to learn more about his late mother’s past. Lucy is grieving the loss of her beloved second husband, while William has had several head-spinning shocks of his own (which I’ll leave for the reader to discover). In their loneliness and sense of dislocation, they join for platonic companionship and comfort, a risky demand at best. Strout excavates the relationship between two people who know each other well, although not as fully as they believe. They fall into old patterns that get disrupted by new discoveries, about each other, and most important, about themselves. While William often remains hidden, guarded with others and not wholly trusted by readers, Lucy is open, honest, and thoroughly likeable. As William says to her, “You are a spirit. There has never been anyone in the world like you. You steal people’s hearts, Lucy.” He speaks the truth. However much William has gotten wrong in his life, in this he is correct. As a fiction writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I’m awed by the range of emotions that Strout expresses with the word “Oh.” She uses these two letters to convey deep sympathy, sharp pain, a dull ache, nudging insight, and utter surprise. From the book’s title to its final page, Strout deftly deploys deceptively simple language to bring readers another rich chapter in the life of the resilient Lucy Barton.

My Goodreads and Amazon review of How Icasia Bloom Touched Happiness by Jessica Bell (Rating 5) – A Meditation on Mortality in a Vividly Imagined Future. Jessica Bell transcends the constrictions of most dystopian novels with a vividly imagined story that ultimately asks why we are put on earth and what our obligations are to ourselves – and especially to others — before we leave it. Icasia surprises herself, and the reader, as she evolves from being a shiftless “tatter” to a caring person. Bell’s futuristic setting is layered with an inventiveness that simultaneously evokes recognition and inspires awe. Her complex characters struggle with love in its many manifestations: parental, filial, romantic, platonic. They confront painful emotions: longing, loss, and despair. As a writer myself, (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire how Bell deftly juggles these elements. Her prose turns positively poetic at the end as she takes on the daunting challenge of defining something as elusive as “happiness” without sounding trite or treacly. If you want to know how you too can touch happiness, be touched by the wisdom in this book.

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Inseparable: A Never-Before Published Novel by Simone de Beauvoir (Rating 4) – Sartre Was Wrong! Inseparable, a heretofore unpublished novel by Simone de Beauvoir, is worth reading for Margaret Atwood’s introduction alone. There readers learn that de Beauvoir decided not to publish the book after the “great” Jean Paul Sartre dismissed its focus on the lives of young women as uninteresting and unworthy compared to existentialism’s significant themes. Sartre was wrong. The book IS indeed about the search for a raison d’être, among women living within the confines of religious, social, and intellectual expectations of post-WWI France. What transforms the book from didacticism into a moving novel is the story of the intense love the narrator Sylvie feels for her schoolmate Andrée, a lively rebel who is nevertheless bound by duty to her mother, social class, and God. The characters are barely disguised versions of de Beauvoir herself and her childhood friend Zaza. The novel captures the asexual passion that women carry for their girlfriends. Any woman who has been devastated by the end of such a relationship — whether from an irreparable rift, diverging lives, or death — will understand the enormity of the lingering fixation on the beloved and the pain of losing her. As a writer of historical fiction (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire how the picture of a particular place and time is balanced with universal portraits of unforgettable individuals. Just as Andrée (Zaza) stayed with Sylvie (Simone) for the rest of her life, so will the friendship between these inseparable girls live on in readers.