The Mourner's Bench: A Novel

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Summary: I've Read Better Fiction On My Cereal Box...
Review: Leandra lives a quiet life in North Carolina working as a doll repairer. This plays a symbolic importance in the book, as Leandra gives the dolls new lives with restores clothes and pieces. As the book begins her terminally ill brother-in-law, Wim, pays a visit to Leandra in the hopes of spending his last days with her, his long-time love.

Ten years earlier, a very young Leandra was summoned to Massachusetts to help care for her beautiful, difficult and distant sister Pamela, who had fled their country background and re-fashioned herself as the sophisticated wife of Wim, a college professor many years her senior.

Pamela was cold and often cruel to both her husband and sister, and bitter about her pregnancy. Leandra and Wim were drawn together in the face of Pamela's rejection of them, and as the pregnancy came to a tragic end, the young Leandra found herself preoccupied with Wim, who paced the floor outside her room each night. Soon, Pamela's behavior became more and more irrational and violent, and while Wim and Leandra were out one night, she ended her life. The chasm of grief and shock was too difficult for either Wim or Leandra to cross and they separated, until the time of the novel's opening.

The novel is told from both Wim and Leandra's point of view, with Wim's sophisticated and intellectual and Leandra's quiet, wise, and spiritual. Ultimately it is Wim's illness and death that heals both of them.

This is a beautifully rendered and deeply touching story.

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Summary: Cultural clash equals riveting suspense.
Review: Susan Dodd will make your head spin with the two dissimilar voices she uses in The Mourner's Bench. One is a southern woman raised in modest circumstances; the other is a New England academic to the manor born. Past trauma drove William from Leandra, but now dying, he comes seeking her at her isolated cabin in North Carolina where she's a doll maker. Their reunion is awkward at first, but there's the delicious prospect that they might finally come to love each other at last.
More than the sum of its parts, The Mourner's Bench is a small book for women readers of all ages.

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinarily well written - but slow moving
Review: The Mourners' Bench is a "must read" for anyone who has ever loved another, nursed someone who is dying or just wants to feel something good way down deep. The sad parts of the book are sad in a good way-the way that lets you feel how powerful love can be and how easily human kindness eases all passings.

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Summary: Lyrical prose, quiet emotion, profound in its impact
Review: This book is a gem. The words literally call out to you to read them aloud. The two narratives flow together seamlessly, weaving in and out of the past as we learn bits and pieces of the story. The restraint Dodd uses to color the love affair is brilliant. As anyone who has ever lost someone--whether to love gone wrong or to death--knows the color of grief is mostly gray. To those reviewers that think this couple lack passion, I say that you weren't paying attention. This was passionate love in one of its purest forms. A deeply moving and wonderfully written book.

Rating:
Summary: I've Read Better Fiction On My Cereal Box...
Review: This book was a dreadful disappointment to me. A friend at work recommended it highly. I really enjoyed it until I reached the beginning of Chapter 1. Then things got difficult.

My main complaint about the book (besides the fact that it moves slowly and is difficult to slog through) is about the characters... they were dreadfully false. Wim is a sorry sack of a man, who gives up what little promise he has to marry Pamela (the most dour and ill-tempered woman he could find). Then after she dies, and Wim contracts a terminal illness, he naturally flees to Pam's nearest relative: Leandra.

The book's story line is gut-wrenchingly, heart-sickeningly, bone-crushingly melodramatic, and the dialogue (esp. Leandra's Southern "drawl") is stilted and forced.

I realize that this is a mean and biting review... but this was one of the worst five books I have ever read. I had to respond.