Ohio Angels

Rating:
Summary: a pleasure to read; lyrical and smooth
Review: In this fine first novel, Harriet Scott Chessman introduces the reader to two wonderful characters, Rose, mother of two, pregnant with a third child, and Hallie, thirty-seven, wanting a child. Rose lives in a small Ohio town, and has given up an academic career. She dreams of writing children's books, while surrounded by the happy details of daily life with her daughters.

Hallie, a painter, lives in New York, but engages again with her close friend when she returns to visit her parents in the Ohio town where she and Rose grew up. Across the small town lawns, porches, and sidewalks, fragrant with bloom and humid in the summer heat, Chessman builds a delicate story.

In luminous prose, Chessman reveals the entwined childhoods and emotional preoccupations of these close friends. The descriptions of motherhood, birth, parenting, and loss are exquisite.

This short novel is wonderful summer reading, highly recommended for individual readers and for book groups.

Rating:
Summary: About the emotional conflicts of two female friends
Review: Ohio Angels is Harriet Scott Chessman's debut novel about the emotional conflicts of two female friends who have to balance their own talents and needs with the demands of family - whether caring for an aging, demanding mother or supporting a husband's career or abandoning one's own talents to look after children. Very strongly recommended for its thoughtful examination of conflicting pulls upon woman's life, Ohio Angels very clearly documents Chessman as an accomplished novelist with a particular gift for writing literate prose with a pronounced lyrical flair.

Rating:
Summary: Expected better
Review: This doesn't come up to the quality of Chessman's Lydia Cassatt Reads the Morning Paper. Although the story itself is interesting, there is too much jumping from one point of view to another to allow much development of any one character in such a short novel, and it felt fragmented to me, with an artificial ending.

Rating:
Summary: Ohio Angels a superb debut
Review: This is the beautiful FIRST novel (not second!) by the acclaimed author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper. Both Ohio Angels and Lydia Cassatt . . . center around questions of an artist's effort to understand and represent someone much loved. And in both, Chessman imagines what it's like to be on the other side of the canvas. I found this earlier story as intimate and moving as the second, and interesting in its use of fragments, each offering a different character's point of view. I recommend it to anyone who cherishes writing that lingers with you long after you come to the last word.