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Title: Breathtaking combo of love, loss and longing...a gem
Review: I just finished this stunner of a novel...I'd read Minot before, but her past works don't quite compare with this. My mother, like the narrator, recently died of cancer and had a similiar "love lost" experience in her 20s. I felt like this book was describing parts of my mother, or any woman for that matter, that others usually can't see. When Ann Lord remembered her affair with Harris Arden, I got goosebumps; when she drifts in and out of coherence on her deathbed, it smacked of an experience I"ve just gone through. But somehow, this book is uplifting, not depressing. The use of Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness is deft, and there's just enough of it. The shifts in time and place are brilliant. These people who give this book only a couple of stars just don't get it...maybe they need to stick with Maeve Binchy!
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