Rating: 
Summary: What a knack for dealing with ordinary life
Review: What always amazes me is Sue Miller's knack of relaying another's story and making all sound so familiar.Cath, a mid-fifties woman twice divorced and wondering at the course of her life has a decision to make. A dying relative leaves her and her brother one of her childhood homes. She and her brother lived with her grandparents after the premature death of her mother. She had a strong bond with both her grandparents, so this long forgotten places beckons to one wondering about her future. Once there Cath finds some old diaries and begins to read them. Here Sue Miller intertwines pieces of Cath's past and that of her grandmother Georgia's. It was a different world when her grandmother was a girl and she is reminded of that in these diaries. She is also given an opportunity to see a side of a grandmother, she never imagined. However in her mid-50s somethings remembered fit in with new information gleaned from the diaries. Also for me personally when Sue Miller wrote of Georgia's stint in a TB sanatorium, it struck a nerve. My dad was a TB survivor of the WWII era and met my mother a girl from the town the sanatorium was in. As I have a disease to thank for my existance, this peculiar sanatorium life has often interested me. This book also gives me an opportunity to see the seriousness of the disease at the time. Unlike today's age of intervention and cure, then most patients were given rest and care in hopes their bodies would do the work of the cure.. Very different than today in many ways. As time goes on Georgia considers her life in earnest and her relationship with those living and dead in Vermont and comes to terms with what will be the next step in her life. What I found interesting here is how "events" both big and small are used as turning points in one's life. Do we need them as an excuse or as a marker of change? I never walk away from one of Sue Miller's book without wondering about my own life and neither will you.
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Summary: What a Wonderful Story
Review: With this one book Sue Miller has become my favorite author. She has in this book "The World Below" created one of those rare books that makes you sad it's over. You know you will miss the character, for a loss for the place.
In the beginning of the book Ms Miller's main character talks about how here Grandmother Georgia could tell a good story, and what a gift that is. That is so true of this book. There are several stories lines going on in this book, wrapped around many lives, and happening in different times. Quite often a book like this can become confusing, but not here. Here it is seamless. Within a few pages you find out about George as a young woman falling in love while in a TB sanitarium, over laid with Granddaughter Cath's second failed marriage. All stories inter-connected, and yet never confused.
Ms Miller created character so real and so a live, that you can't help but feel sadness at a death or your heart race to find that Cath's daughter baby was born prematurely. True test for me, is if the character seem to come to life, and her's do. She even nails the small town real estate agent, pushy and yet neighborly enough to bring you soup when she hear your sick.
The true test for me came when Cath moved to her Grandmother's old house in Vermont. Would Ms Miller understand Vermont, or would she make it that hokey Hollywood place. The Vermont you will find in "The World Below" is real. When she tells you about the long ride from Barstow to Rutland, because that's where you have to go to shop, that's life here. There is a reference about Cath seeing the state in broad circle while she is covering the local high school football team's season, that is the way sports are in Vermont. The title of the book come from a fishing trip Cath took with her Grandfather when she was teen, I knew where the Lake was, knew what just by the description, and was glad to find that I was right, several chapters later.
Don't miss out on this book; it is a really good read.
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