Between the Pages

Reta Winters has a nice house, a lovely common-law husband of 26 years, three daughters and a blossoming career as a writer of light fiction.  However, her world has started to fall apart since her eldest daughter Norah started living on the streets, begging in Toronto, wearing a sign around her neck that simply says ‘Goodness’.

Throughout the book, Reta tries to determine what happened in Norah’s life to cause her to drop out of university, finish with her boyfriend, and start begging on streets.  She also talks about her daily life, her struggle to write a sequel to her first novel, her constant worries about Norah’s health and welfare, and her relationships with friends and family.

Unfortunately this book didn’t really work for me.  It was narrated by Reta and she seemed to be a very self-absorbed character, who never stopped pondering life’s questions; nothing wrong with that of course, but she seemed to find questions everywhere, and the narrative seemed to get bogged down in her over analytical thoughts and navel gazing.

Obviously, the reader is seeing Reta at a desperately worrying time in her life, and I felt sympathy for her plight, but she never seemed like a believable character to me.  It also didn’t seem like the reader was given much of a chance to know her other two daughters, and certainly her partner Tom was never really described at all beyond having an interest in trilobites.  Throughout the book, Reta writes letters to people who have offended her – the authors of articles in magazines for instance.  These letters were all about Reta’s anger at women in general being ignored by men in society.  It seemed somewhat ironic that the male in Reta’s family was largely ignored as a character in the story.

It isn’t all bad – I was eager to find out what specific event, if any, had caused Norah to effectively give up on society, and there was a lovely scene near the end involving Reta’s annoying, pushy new editor.  The writing was usually very elegant, and this is a book that has had lots of very positive reviews.  I could appreciate the writing, even if I didn’t really always enjoy it.

(For more information about the author, please click here.)