A Song From An Empty Forest : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Fast paced, but could have been better
Review: A SONG FROM AN EMPTY FOREST by Kathleen Ann Anderson
September 29, 2004

A SONG FROM AN EMPTY FOREST by Kathleen Ann Anderson was the story of a woman's fight for survival and her journey in the search of a better life. The book reads like a historical novel. It starts with the birth of Emily, the main character of this book. It is a tragic scene, ending with the death of her mother Rachael. Seventeen years later, Emily is living with her mother's family, and has been treated like dirt all these years for reasons at first unknown to the reader. She is treated like a servant, and is not given any love or affection except by her grandmother, who dies when Emily is only three years old.

Emily finds a way to escape, but not before she accidentally kills one of her uncles, and she is now on the run. She makes her way to San Francisco, in search of a man that had supposedly befriended her mother before Emily's birth, and from there she soon finds a job as nanny to a wealthy man's two children.

Life sounds like it should have been grand at this point, but Emily sees and hears things in her new employer's home that causes her employer to threaten her and to warn her to mind her own business. And she also finds her past continues to haunt her, never giving her peace of mind.

My overall opinion about A SONG FROM AN EMPTY FOREST is that I did enjoy the book. There were plenty of punctuation errors (excessive use of the comma, for example), but these were minor problems and did not really detract from the enjoyment of the book.

This was a page-turner, and had a hard time putting the book down as I got more involved in the story. There was an element of mystery in this book, as well as the suspense of whether Emily would be hunted down for the murder of her uncle. While the book for the most part was good, I felt the ending was a bit contrived and also felt that the characters did not always behave in a logical manner, especially towards the end of the novel, which took place before the Civil rights movement of the late 1960's.

I'm giving this book three stars, for being a page-turner, and keeping me glued to the book, but could have been better if the characters were thought out a little bit better.

Rating:
Summary: Some promise here...and a good little fast read
Review: A SONG FROM AN EMPTY FOREST succeeds because of the integrity of the author's purpose: Kathleen Ann Anderson structures her first novel with propulsive force and advances the story of an abused 'orphan' who has the desire to find her true history and begin a life away from the abusive all-male environment of her Grandfather's home. Anderson has structured her novel well - events are first suggested, then happen, then have consequences and there are enough characters inhabiting the atmosphere that fall into focus to make the journey credible. This is a good story to read in your leisure, easily read in an evening's diversion. Perhaps in her next ventures Anderson will grow into a more polished developer of three-dimensional characters, and maybe the language will become more elegant and a little less 'fact begets fact' that keeps this novel grounded as opposed to taking flight. The promise is there, especially for a first novel.

Rating:
Summary: Best novel I have read in a long time
Review: Emily is a character that will enthrall anyone who can appreciate a well written novel. The author does a beautiful job of bringing Emily to life in such a way that is sure to make an emotional connection. A Song From An Empty Forest earnestly looks at the difficulties that life has dealt to Emily. The poignant journey of her hardships blossoms into an inspirational triumph of the spirit that lives within her. A must read for everyone!

Rating:
Summary: Poor Emily Rezell
Review: Emily Rezell's life is about to undergo a tectonic shift. The main character of Kathleen Ann Anderson's "A Song from an Empty Forest," the young girl came into the world under the most questionable of circumstances. Her mother, imprisoned in her home due to an out of wedlock pregnancy, perished during a spur of the moment escape attempt. This woman did manage to give birth to her child before succumbing, however, and the story immediately shifts seventeen years into the future, 1957 to be exact, to begin the story of the hapless Emily. The teenager knows little about her mother and the events of 1940, but she understands her presence in her grandfather's farmhouse is most unwelcome. Emily tries to do her best cooking, cleaning, and generally waiting hand and foot on the men in her life, but it's never enough. Despairing that her family will ever treat her decently, she discovers from a female relative a few tentative bits of information about her deceased mother, and decides to escape to freedom. The plan goes off with one big hitch: her Uncle Frank, an evil man with a disgusting proclivity, dies during a confrontation with his young and beautiful niece. Rezell thus goes forth in the world with a possible murder charge hanging over her head.

With nothing more than two hundred dollars in her pocket, Emily heads west to California in search of Samuel Dimsmoore, a man who wrote a letter to her mother long ago. On the train west, Rezell meets a nice young doctor who will figure prominently in her future. In the meantime, once she arrives in San Francisco she must secure lodgings and employment since two hundred dollars won't go far even in the late 1950s. Almost immediately on her disembarkation from the train, Rezell falls into trouble when a waitress at a diner takes the clueless farm girl to one of the city's better known houses of ill repute. Our heroine doesn't recognize her surroundings immediately, but it doesn't take long for her to recognize something isn't quite right about the place. Upon her arrival, Emily catches the eye of the wealthy Donald Schillings, a mysterious man who knows the young woman just arrived on the scene and thus wishes to hire her as a nanny to his children. The two kids are great, but the house and atmosphere of the Schillings place would rub anyone's nerves raw. It turns out Donny has a few unpleasant secrets, secrets accounting for his huge wealth and massive political clout. Emily takes it upon herself to bring down the Schillings Empire, and at the same time uncover clues about her mysterious past.

I generally liked Anderson's book. The subject matter, namely a young girl embarking on a series of adventures with a heavy emphasis on romance, is not the sort of thing I normally read. Heck, I usually wouldn't even admit that I read a book carrying the romance label. But since I confessed some time back to reading--and hugely enjoying--Marian Keyes's "The Other Side of the Story," I guess I can't hurt my credibility any further with this book. Fortunately, a significant element of mystery threads its way through the story, enough to blot out the romance themes from time to time. "A Song from an Empty Forest" is at its best when developing the Emily character. The reader cannot help but sympathize with the series of tragedies that make up this young girl's life. Several incidents, specifically Uncle Frank's attentions and the eventual unmasking of the girl's father, could very well lead to the social and familial isolation Emily encounters at home. Anyone experiencing the same sort of situations would definitely end up hitting the road. The surprise here is that it takes Rezell so long to do so.

What I liked about the book was often offset by many problems. Expect to see quite a few grammatical errors and typos in the book. "A Song from an Empty Forest" is a self-published manuscript, which means that editing sometimes falls low on the list of priorities. Regular readers of these types of novels soon learn to live with this problem, and I don't wish to pick on Anderson as I have read other books with far more typographical errors than this one, but it is a valid point to mention to prospective readers because bad grammar often interferes with a novel's narrative flow. I will say that I never felt this was the case with Anderson's novel; the errors are there but they are fairly easy to work through. The biggest problem I noted were misplaced commas, and again I don't hold this against the author. I know for a fact that I misuse commas all the time--along with semicolons (a biggie), colons, dashes, and many other writing rules.

A bigger problem involved Emily's relationship to her Uncle Frank. Considering what went on between the two, I felt the author didn't give enough weight to these tragedies. Rezell suffered for some six or seven years from Frank's malefic activities yet we don't learn about it for many pages. Only when her uncle confronts her immediately prior to her final departure from the farm do we even learn what he's been doing to his niece. I'm no expert on abusive relationships, but I can't imagine Emily wouldn't bear more scars from these encounters, that they wouldn't dominate her every waking moment; she seems awfully blasé about the whole thing when it should serve as the primary reason for her decision to leave. This problem aside, I enjoyed the book. The author does have a few interesting ideas that, with a bit more attention to detail and plot elements, could emerge as a truly wonderful reading experience.




Rating:
Summary: very compelling book
Review: this Book takes on a pressence from the word jump&you just become wrapped into it.a Young Lady Named Emily is the center piece&Her journey in life has already been a Battle add on that her Relationship with Her Grandfather. so many twists&turns here but a very Good Story that has so many up hill climbs&Battles. a Good Book.

Rating:
Summary: A powerful, emotional story sure to touch your heart
Review: We may not like to think about it, but there are untold numbers of people, especially young people, living lives of quiet desperation out there. We do need to think about it, though, and that is why books such as Kathleen Ann Anderson's A Song From an Empty Forest are such worthwhile reads. I confess I don't read a lot of books like this, partly because - behind my obsession with horror, science fiction, and fantasy - I'm actually a pretty sensitive guy, and I find it emotionally painful to read about good people trapped in unfortunate situations. I'm glad I read this novel, though, as it helped to reawaken a sense of my own humanity and inspired me in the form of the protagonist's commitment to goodness in a world that had little goodness to share with her.

It is 1957, and Emily Rezell is not yet eighteen when she decides she must leave her Grandfather's farm forever. It is a farm she has barely set foot away from in all of her life, as she has been kept there to take care of her hateful Grandfather. She lost her parents when she was a baby, and her grandmother died when she was three; since then, she has basically been alone and trapped. Her great-aunt had secretly taught her to read, though, and Emily has put her dreams to paper in the form of stories; this scrapbook is really all she has - until, one winter day, her sickly great-aunt advises her to run away and tells her where she can find a silver bar to help pay her way and a necklace that had been in the family for years. After that great-aunt dies, Emily puts her plan into motion, only to have everything discovered by Frank, a man who has grossly mistreated her all her life. Forced to defend herself from Frank's unwanted demands, she puts an end to his licentious crimes for good.

Finally managing to get away, Emily heads for San Francisco, hoping to find a former friend of her mother's. She is naturally quite naïve, having never traveled anywhere at all, and the fright and guilt driven into her heart back at home in Illinois remains a heavy burden on her spirit. She meets a nice man on the train out west, the first person to ever make her feel like a real person, but she is completely alone when she reaches San Francisco. A waitress discovers her predicament, upbraids her for her foolishness, and "helps" her by finding her a place to stay. Now just about anyone would know what kind of place this is immediately, but poor Emily, once she figures it out, feels she has no option but to stay, having been robbed of her few small treasures by that time. Oddly enough, though, she soon gets a nanny position in a rich man's house, and she comes to love the two youngsters in her charge. As you might expect, though, her new boss is not exactly of humanitarian of the year caliber, and he controls her by way of his knowledge of the arrest warrant out for her back in Illinois. She may have a nice bed to sleep in now, but Emily finds herself in increasing danger as she begins to work out the true nature of her employer's dealings.

Thankfully, some good things finally begin to happen for Emily before the novel closes, but these come at great cost and actually lead to further trials for this unfortunate young lady. Through it all, she never loses that wholesome spirit that makes her such a wonderful character. The author actually surprised me with a few revelations in the closing chapters, and she does a wonderful job of bringing this novel to a close without letting the story devolve into a sort of sappiness that might have robbed it of its full effect. This is a wonderful book that is far more complicated than it might seem at first glance. I'm not sure the author communicated her themes as effectively as she might have, especially those involving the abuse Emily experienced for so many years back on the farm, and the race relations in the story come across as simpler than I would expect for the setting of the late 1950s, but A Song From an Empty Forest is still a very powerful emotional story that definitely touched my heart in a special way.