Summary:

Madame Raquin, a widowed haberdasher, lives with her son, Camille, who has a history of poor health and is weak and uneducated, and her niece, Thérèse, conceived in Algeria by Madame’s soldier brother and a “native woman,” both of whom are now dead. Raised by her aunt as companion to the invalid Camille, Thérèse is a model of repression. When Thérèse turns twenty-one, she and Camille marry, and the three move from the country to Paris. One day Camille brings home an old friend, Laurent. He and Thérèse become lovers and decide to murder Camille so they can marry. On an outing they go boating and Laurent drowns Camille.

The murder replaces their mutual passion with guilt, remorse, and evenutally, hatred. The two must wait before they can marry without arousing suspicion; they are both increasingly haunted by memories of Camille and visions of his corpse. When the aging and still-bereft Madame Raquin actually helps arrange for them to marry (to ensure that they will take care of her), they torture each other with their proximity, and they torture Madame Raquin, now immobilized and silenced by a stroke, by allowing her to learn that her trusted caregivers killed her son. The three live in torment until, finally, Thérèse and Laurent kill each other.

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Within the first few pages of this novel, the reader is thrust into the midst of a family--their past history, their present tragedy, and their future healing.  Kitty Duvall, a middle-aged woman living in Baltimore, Maryland, receives a phone call informing her that her son, soldier Vincent Duvall, has been injured in Viet Nam and now lies, severely burned, in the Intensive Care Unit of Brooke Army Medical Center.  Kitty packs her bags and rushes to his bedside.  Thus begins this straight forward and yet complex story, one that weaves between past and present, one that examines the lives of caregivers, especially nurses; the lives of patients, particularly those young men and women sacrificed to war; and the lives of the parents who must, as Kitty does, find their places alongside their dying or healing children, always wondering how best to help them. 

Although this book is a novel, it reads like a memoir.  Indeed, the events of the novel seem so right and so accurate because the author served as a lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps at Brooke Army Medical Center during the Vietnam War.  Her own experience as a nurse, her own memories of the burned and wounded men, inform this novel and bring to it an accuracy and an urgency that takes the reader behind the scenes into unforgettable images of war and recovery.  Although set in the Vietnam era, this story is especially relevant today, when once again soldiers and their families must deal with the physical and emotional wages of battle.

 

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Ann, the primary protagonist, is diagnosed with and operated on for breast cancer. Her family history leads her to suspect that she may have passed the breast cancer gene on to her daughters-this assertion without having been tested. She retreats from society. Her husband leaves her and she raises two daughters, ever plagued with guilt. The two daughters, as technology advances, choose to have themselves tested. One daughter, tests positive for BRCA-2; the second daughter is not tested, but is diagnosed with breast cancer.

The mystery becomes: from which parent did the women inherit the gene? While the younger daughter struggles with her progressive cancer, the older daughter goes in search of the genetic contributor. Since this becomes a search for an answer, the answer remains up to the reader to pursue. The angst created by the unanswered questions makes up the bulk of the intrigue, and may emulate real life struggles with this particular disease.

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This is the tale of two youngsters who are, each in his or her own way, misfits in their environment. Jess is the only son of a farm family in the south, who cannot find his place as a fifth grader in his school. Leslie is the new arrival on the scene, who is also, for very different reasons, not a part of the local culture. The two connect, create their own magical kingdom in which they can reign and feel comfortable. They swing across the creek on a rope into Teribithia, a forested respite from a world that does not seem to work comfortably for either of them. The tale evolves through the development of this friendship, only to end in tragedy when Leslie drowns in the creek one day when Jess is away. The remainder of the story has to do with Jess's grief work, his steps through most of Kubler-Ross' stages, and eventual reconciliation with the loss of his best friend.

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The novel opens with a young surgical nurse, Justine Brent, nursing a mill worker whose arm has been mangled by a carding machine. She soon meets John Amherst, the mill’s assistant manager who works passionately to reform the dangerous conditions at the mill and to improve the living conditions of the workers. Amherst recognizes Justine’s intelligence and sympathy, but he quickly forgets about her when he meets and falls in love with the new mill owner, Bessy Langhope.

The narrative skips ahead three years. John Amherst has learned that his now-wife Bessy has no real interest in his plan to reform the mill, although she initially appeared to be moved by the workers’ misery. In fact, her insistence on luxury, which is funded by the profit from the mills, thwarts his desire to use her controlling interest to make significant changes. The couple encounters Justine, who knew Bessy in school. When the somewhat sickly Bessy invites her to be a private nurse to herself and her stepdaughter, Justine, who is exhausted from “difficult cases,” accepts. Justine attempts to shore up John and Bessy’s increasingly troubled marriage without success. When John is abroad, Bessy has an accident while riding her horse. Paralyzed, in constant pain, and slowly dying, Bessy is attended by a physician who advances his career with the technological feat of keeping Bessy alive, ostensibly until her husband and her father arrive to say their goodbyes. When Bessy begs Justine to let her die, Justine secretly gives her a fatal dose of morphine, an act that the physician suspects.

The narrative skips ahead again to over a year later when Amherst, who has inherited the mills from Bessy, invites her family to celebrate the opening of an emergency hospital he has built in the mill town. Justine, who had stayed on after Bessy’s death as her stepdaughter’s nurse, and Amherst become reacquainted. Their shared social and intellectual interests develop into love, and they marry. The physician who had cared for Bessy and who had, earlier, asked Justine to marry him, had developed an addiction, one that had begun while he was treating Bessy. Beginning to sink into financial ruin, he blackmails Justine. Eventually, Amherst finds out that Justine killed Bessie with morphine and, horrified, rejects her.

Justine confesses her act to Bessy’s father and negotiates a deal: She will remove herself from their lives if he allows Amherst to continue his work at the mills. Bessy’s father accepts the deal, and Justine disappears for many months until Bessy’s daughter becomes ill and begs to be reunited with Justine. A family friend explains to Amherst Justine’s arrangement to protect him and convinces him that she has suffered suitable penance. Justine is reunited with Amherst when he celebrates the opening of a gymnasium for the mill workers, a project he credits Bessy with having designed. Justine, who knows that Bessy had in fact designed the gymnasium for her private estate, a project that would have drained the funds for improving the mills, keeps silent and subverts her knowledge to her husband’s perception of the facts.

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Squandering his wealth in an attempt to gain the affection of a beautiful woman, Federigo degli Alberighi is left with only a small farm and a magnificent falcon. Federigo loves Monna Giovanna, a young woman of nobility who is already married and has a son. After her wealthy husband dies, Monna and her son travel to their country estate near the farm where Federigo lives. The boy becomes friends with him and covets the prized falcon.

Soon the boy is sick. He has one request: "Mother, if you can arrange for me to have Federigo's falcon, I think I would get well quickly." (p. 427) Monna is well aware of Federigo's love for her, but she also realizes how attached the man is to the falcon. Monna makes an unannounced visit to Federigo's farm. Before she declares the purpose of her call, he decides to honor Monna with a meal.

Unfortunately, Federigo has nothing to serve her. He catches a glimpse of his falcon on its perch. He breaks its neck and has it roasted on a spit. Monna eats the bird unaware that it is the animal she has come to request for her son. After dining, she asks Federigo for his falcon. All he can do is weep. He then reveals that he sacrificed the creature to provide a meal worthy of Monna. A few days later, her son dies. After a period of sorrow and resentment, she marries Federigo.

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Nate, 14, comes home to his family's Montana farm one day to see police cars. His father, whose head is bloodied from a gunshot wound, is taken away in an ambulance. He and his 7-year-old sister are whisked into the house and cared for by an aunt until their mother, shocked and withdrawn, returns home. In the weeks following Nate finds it hard to get any adults to level with him about what happened, though he overhears conversations that make it fairly clear it was a suicide attempt. The kids at school withdraw from him and his sister; parents in the area tell their children not to play with them, as they always suspected there was something strange about the family. Only one girl, herself something of an outcast because of her father's aggressive fundamentalist preaching, befriends him, and becomes his partner in a science project.

Nate throws his energies into the project--creating a cloud chamber in which radiation from distant stars can be seen--and into pitching for the baseball team. Both are enterprises his father would have helped him with. His father, a dreamer and scientific visionary, is in a mental hospital, recovering. The police fail to find the rifle, but Nate and two friends do find it, and so exonerate his mother, who has been under suspicion in the inconclusive case.

After the contest, in which a disgruntled student sabotages what is actually a remarkably successful and well-made project, he takes Junie and the family car and drives several hours to find his father who, it turns out, is lucid and recovering, but blind. Their mother is selling the farm, they are about to move, but there is hope of some recovery on all sides, though not what any of them would have foreseen or chosen.

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Annie, eleven, has been sent to spend the summer with her grandmother after she and her mother get the news that her father is missing in action at the end of World War II. Annie herself has just recovered from a month-long stay in the hospital, following surgery for a burst appendix. While there, she developed a habit of entering dream encounters with President Truman, who appears in dreams and fantasies to reassure her about her father, and about the other uncertainties she faces.

While at her grandmother's home in Walla Walla, Washington, a small farm town, a young African-American woman, a war widow, comes looking for work and is taken into the grandmother's house as an accountant. She and Annie become fast friends, much to the disapproval of her uncle, her father's younger brother, who has returned from the war wounded and bitter, having alone survived a battle in which all the other members of his platoon died. He and a few other troublemakers make escalating attempts to get the African-American woman to leave, including threats and a burning cross in the yard. But the grandmother, Annie, and Miss Gloria, who has seen worse racism in Georgia, hold out.

Eventually the brother comes to his senses and reports his fellow culprits to the police. Annie's father is found in a hospital in France, recovering from serious wounds as well as temporary amnesia. He and her mother arrive in Walla Walla after Annie has made a prize-winning speech in her new school about the losses and costs of war to individuals who return, going beyond the count of those dead. The father is nearly blind, but otherwise fairly well recovered, and he is accompanied by a young African-American aide who brings a ray of hope for companionship to Miss Gloria.

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Sophie, who has lived with her aunt in Haiti for the 12 years since her birth is being sent to live with her mother in New York. She leaves her aunt and grandmother amid a riot at the airport, and arrives in New York to meet her mother and her mother's long-term lover. Her mother has frequent nightmares, related, as it turns out, to the rape that eventuated in the birth of Sophie. Sophie's mother insists that the only road out of poverty is to study hard; she wants Sophie to become a doctor, and jealously oversees her work and protects her virginity, frequently testing her to make sure she has not been sexually active.

Eventually Sophie elopes with a kind musician, Joseph, but finds herself unable to enjoy sex. She returns to Haiti with their baby while he is on tour, and finds refuge among the women who raised her, though they themselves suffer various effects of poverty, alcohol, and violence. Sophie's mother flies to Haiti to be reconciled with her and takes her back to New York where the two women and their partners briefly share peace and kindness. But when Sophie's mother finds she is pregnant, she begins to have the nightmares about rape again, and kills herself. Sophie and the mother's lover fly to Haiti for the burial. Sophie runs away from the gravesite into the fields where her mother was raped, and attacks the cane stalks in fury, frustration, and a final cathartic gesture of self-liberation from a painful past.

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