What Is Left the Daughter Review
Purchasing this book was a total impulse buy. I found it under the Kindle Editor's List of Favorites through Facebook, it caught my eye, and after reading the short synopsis, I bought it. It's very far from my normal book choices of Historical Fiction and Southern Fiction, but it pulled me right in. Why? I'm not sure. It's not a fast-paced story, there's no real action to it, but it's a great novel that slowly absorbs your interest without you even realizing it.
When 17 year old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned one night in 1941, his entire life changes. He goes to live with his Aunt Constance, Uncle Donald, and their adopted daughter Tilda in Middle Economy, Nova Scotia. Wyatt falls deeply in love with Tilda, while she falls just as deeply in love with Hans Mohring, a German student studying at the local college. WWII is raging and German U-boats are prowling the coast of Canada making everyone uneasy, especially Donald who becomes more and more obsessed with news of the U-boats whereabouts and the Canadian ships that have been lost. He spend hours listening to his radio for any news, and he tacks newspaper clipping in the workshop he shares with Wyatt. He is extremely un-trusting of his daughters new love interest, and after a terrible loss to his family, he takes all his pent up rage and loss out on young Hans...forever altering the lives of everyone close to him.
My heart just went out for Wyatt. He's a simple teenager who grows to become a simple man. After getting dragged down by his uncle's hatred and having to give up almost 3 years of his life, he settles into a lonely yet hardworking existence. He has a few very close friends, but mainly he's just left to think on all he's lost in his young life: both his parents, both his Aunt and Uncle, the woman he loves and the daughter they share. This entire book is Wyatt's letter to his daughter Marlais. It explains to her everything that happened between himself, her mother Tilda, Hans, and the reasons for the complete destruction of their family. He tells her how much he loves her, and why he's been absent almost all the years of her life. He tells her his thoughts and feelings of the 20+ years since his life was forever changed in 1941. It's a sweet and heartbreaking story.
I absolutely recommend this. It is a war-time love story that is simple, yet powerful. I've never read previous works by Mr. Norman, but I'll definitely have to look into some of his other novels. He's a wonderful storyteller who has a beautiful way with words. I'm so glad I stepped out of my box and gave this book a try. It was an absolute pleasure to read.
What Is Left the Daughter Feature
- ISBN13: 9780618735433
- Condition: New
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What Is Left the Daughter Overview
Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country’s finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books—The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L—in this erotically charged and morally complex story.
Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges—the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda.
Setting in motion the novel’s chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents—including a German U-boat’s sinking of the Nova Scotia–Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling—lend intense narrative power to Norman’s uncannily layered story.
Wyatt’s account of the astonishing—not least to him— events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It’s a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one.
An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.
What Is Left the Daughter Specifications
Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: On a stormy Nova Scotia night in 1967, the loner Wyatt Hillyer has come to terms with his life's choices and self-imposed separation from his daughter Marlais. Realizing that one of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is an honest picture of himself, Wyatt has decided to write his memoirs in the form of a letter on the occasion of Marlais' twenty-first birthday. With great clarity and economy he slowly discloses the events of his parents’ scandalous deaths in 1941, his teenage years living with his aunt and uncle, the joys of fatherhood, and what led to his abandoning his only daughter and her mother. Returning to Canada's Maritime provinces in his latest novel, What Is Left the Daughter, acclaimed author Howard Norman has created an unpredictable and absorbing story of an imperfect and tragic life at a turning point. This short and potent novel will leave readers replaying events and reconsidering Wyatt and the other unique characters long after reading the final pages.
--Lauren Nemroff
Product Description Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books--
The Bird Artist,
The Museum Guard, and
The Haunting of L--in this erotically charged and morally complex story.
Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges--the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda.
Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents--including a German U-boat's sinking of the Nova Scotia-Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling--lend intense narrative power to Norman's uncannily layered story.
Wyatt's account of the astonishing--not least to him--events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It's a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one.
An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.
Amazon Exclusive: Howard Frank Mosher Reviews
What Is Left the DaughterHoward Frank Mosher is the author of 10 novels, his most recent book is Walking to Gatlinburg. Mosher's novel A Stranger in the Kingdom won the New England Book Award for Fiction and was made into a movie, as were his novels Disappearances and Where the Rivers Flow North. Read his guest review of What Is Left the Daughter:
As my sainted grandmother used to say, with a hard look right straight at 12-year-old, misbehaving me, let's not mince words here. Okay, let's not: Howard Norman's new novel, What Is Left the Daughter, is the best story of love in the time of war I've ever read. And yes, that includes Cold Mountain and A Farewell To Arms.
It's the early 1940s in Halifax, Nova Scotia. World War II, in all its fury, has come to Canada, as the dreaded German U-boats are sinking ferries and passenger ships just off the coast. In the meantime, 17-year-old Wyatt Hillyer's parents, caught up in a love triangle in which they've both fallen for a local switchboard operator and aspiring actress, have without warning leapt to their deaths "from separate bridges in Halifax on the same evening." Bereft and adrift, Wyatt soon moves to the tiny Bay of Fundy outport of Middle Economy, to work in his uncle's sled and toboggan shop.
It will come as no surprise to Norman's readers to learn that, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's jungle-village of Macondo, Middle Economy is a universe unto itself. What's more, its residents are every bit as strange and wondrous. For starters, there's kindly, plain-spoken Cornelia Tell, a one-woman Greek chorus of information and assessments. The town's aspiring stenographer, Lenore Teachout, takes down every conversation she overhears, and even transcribes the most awful war news over the radio. The casualty reports so distress Wyatt's eccentric uncle that he's papered the side of his toboggan shop with newspaper accounts of ships sunk by U-boats. Wyatt's beautiful, adopted cousin, Tilda, is obsessed by obituaries. Her dream in life is to become a "professional mourner" at the funerals of people who die without family or friends.
When Hans Mohring, a likable young refugee from Hitler's Germany, visits Middle Economy and falls in love with Tilda, all hell breaks loose in the village, including the bloodiest and most shocking murder in recent fiction, the strangest (and, in places, funniest) courtroom sequence I've ever read, and the unspeakably sorrowful, total dissolution of the Hillyer family.
Or does Wyatt's beloved family come totally unraveled in the onslaught of the war and its madness? Suffice it to say that What Is Left the Daughter, which is structured as a long letter from Wyatt, written in 1967 to his 21-year-old daughter, just may hold out the prospect of a transcendent love so powerful and enduring that it affirms the value and meaning of our lives even in the worst of times and despite all of our tragic flaws.
What Is Left the Daughter affirms what many of Howard Norman's readers have known since he published his magical first novel, The Northern Lights. Norman is most certainly one of America's three or four best novelists, with a uniquely wise and tolerant vision of his characters and all human beings everywhere. So let's not mince words. What Is Left the Daughter is a literary masterpiece that will, I guarantee it, live on in your heart, and mine, forever.
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Customer Reviews
Amazing Historical Novel about Tangled Relationships in Wartime Novia Scotia - Charlene Rubush - Donalsonville, Georgia
Howard Norman is an exceptional writer. This tale of the effects of his parents suicides on 17 year-old Wyatt Hillyer, kept me engrossed throughout the book.
Set in the village of Middle Economy, Novia Scotia, we enter a world of interesting characters. The orphaned Wyatt goes to live with his Aunt Constance and Uncle Donald, where Wyatt will become an apprentice to his uncle, and learn the trade of making sleds and toboggans.
While there, he becomes enamored of Tilda, a young woman whose own parents had died when she was a child. She'd been taken in by Constance and Donald, who had been unable to have children of their own. Wyatt stands by helplessly, as he watches Tilda fall in love with a German student named Hans Mohring. The complications from this pairing, resonate throughout the book.
To give an idea of the flavor of the story, I'll quote this passage. On his way to his uncle's house, Wyatt, (p.14) "drove my father's black Desoto four-door, badly in need of repairs, but they could wait--to Middle Economy, smoking Chesterfield cigarettes one after the next. Nowadays it's paralleled by Highway 102, but in 1941 you could only take Route 2 north to Truro, at the center of the province. Between the roadside villages of Beaver Bank, Home Settlement, Shubencadie, Alton, Stewiacke, Hilden and Millbrook were long stretches of woods and fields."
As one who has been fortunate to have visited Novia Scotia, reading this book has been a lovely reminder of the rich culture and the unbelievably gorgeous scenery that abounds in this incredible place that is so steeped in maritime history. For those who have not been blessed yet to visit there, this will whet your appetite.
Norman is a master of painting scenes and conveying individual quirks that make for unforgettable characters. We watch as Uncle Donald becomes increasingly obsessed with listening to radio broadcasts about the war and the encroaching German u-boats. His obsession becomes so complete, as to lead him to move out of his house and away from his wife, and into his work shed, where he plasters newspaper clippings about the war to the walls.
This excellent novel shows how war can affect and infect, people's minds, bodies, and souls. It's a story of surviving great tragedy. It's also a story of deep love, and how the power of love ties people together; how it can transform and heal. I loved this book! Very highly recommended.
better than described - Joyce Clements Goldman -
item arrived very quickly and was in even better shape that the description. I was very happy with this purchase.
Unassuming yet powerful story - Beth Tracy - Salt Lake City, UT
This slim novel is packed with such an emotional punch but told in such a quiet, reserved way -- a rarity for writers nowadays as they try repeatedly to throw drama and believable characters in our faces. "What Is Left The Daughter" doesn't beat you over the head with its plot, instead gently weaving its way through a love story/tragedy. There are quite a few dramatic plot moments, but Mr. Norman composes them in such a way that you don't necessarily see them coming, but once it does, it is clear that he carefully and methodically laid the groundwork.
Just like the stories, the characters are well-described and believable, yet never become a caricature of themselves. Probably my favorite character was Cornelia, who is kind, unapologetic, and blunt without ever losing her compassion. Even the "villian" of the story has a glimmer of compassion in him that leaves open the slightest door of understanding for his actions. (Or at least for me he did...)
I have not read any of Mr. Norman's previous books but definitely intend to track them all down. His deep, thought-provoking writing is a rare gem to find.
*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Aug 28, 2010 19:09:06
