The Windmill

Rating:
Summary: Top 10 Book
Review: After hearing a few of my book friends mention Stephanie Gertler, I thought I would give The Windmill a shot and I am so happy that I did.

From the outside looking in, it would have seemed that Carl and Olivia had the perfect marriage. They had a nice home, two children that they loved dearly, and good careers at the local college but something vital was always missing between them.

One day, a student of Carls came into his office and asked if he could change a lab day because he wanted to go home to North Carolina to visit a woman that was very close to the family that had suddenly taken ill. A few days later after recognizing the name of the town and woman who was ill, Carl left Olivia a cryptic note and took off and headed to his home town in North Carolina. It was time to meet up with his past and make peace with a secret he has been holding inside since he was a teenager.

While he was gone, Olivia took the time to deal with her own past. Her first husband Noah was murdered and she was never able to deal with his death and move on the way she should have to allow Carl into her heart. With her mothers help Olivia takes a step back in time to remember and grieve for Noah, but then allow herself to love Carl the way she should.

The Windmill is a beautifully written story about dealing with the loss of a loved one and then being able to open your heart and find love again. It is also about dealing with the past and the lies that we tell to cover it up.

This book is going down as a Top 10 read for 2004. I just loved it and am looking forward to catching up on more books by Stepahanie Gertler.



Rating:
Summary: deep character study
Review: Belvedere College Professors Olivia and Carl Larkin enjoy teaching, love their two children, Daniel and Sophie, who are away at school, and appreciate life in Willow, Massachusetts that enables them to take weekend jaunts to the Cape. In their fifties, everything seems perfect for this couple until Carl vanishes for no apparent reason though he left behind a weird note that tells Livi nothing except he insists he is okay.

Livi feels abandoned by the man who rescued her when she felt forlorn and vanished in 1978 after her previous husband Noah Emerson died trying to stop a hold-up with her name being his last word. Unbeknownst to Livi while she struggles with Carl's disappearance reminding her of her buried windmill past, her spouse returns to his hometown to face his family past that he hid from his beloved Livi. Where will these solo journeys to yesteryear lead to for this middle age couple struggling for the first time in two decades alone?

Stephanie Gertler provides her audience with a deep character study of two individuals happily married for over two decades, but their secrets that they kept from one another finally surface when Carl can no longer ignore his past. The story line contains two plots somewhat rotated in first person narratives as readers follow the respective treks of Carl and Livi as much on a mental plane as in the physical world. Adding to the depth of looking closely at the sandwich generation is the woes of the octogenarian parents as fans will appreciate souls battling windmills successfully when the heart makes room for others as Noah had understood before he tragically died.

Harriet Klausner


Rating:
Summary: nice read but nothing spectacular
Review: I was hoping THE WINDMILL was going to be as good as the author's last book: DRIFTING (which I really loved!) but it wasn't. THE WINDMILL is a novel about a couple whose marriage is filled with secrets and through revealing them and healing, do they get past the distance between them all these years.

Olivia was a likeable character and certainly Noah, her first husband, was a favored one as well. Noah had lots of spunk and life to him but sadly his life is cut short. She grieves long, of course, and then marries Carl, who has secrets as well. The two drift through life and years later Carl just disappears one day.

The novel is fast moving and well written but I guess I was wanting more. When the story ended, I felt satisfied but just not enough to give it 5 stars. I'll read more of this author's books but this isn't one of my favorites. Some of the plot seemed too forced and familiar with other novels. The connection of the windmill was alittle corny and I normally don't mind corny!

Rating:
Summary: Satisfying, well written tale
Review: One pre-release review described The Windmill as a weepy tale that was hollow at the center. I respectfully but emphatically disagree. The story was touching, yes, but there was nothing hollow about it. The characters were so appealing that by book's end I felt like they were dear, long-time friends. Locations near the blustery Atlantic are beautifully detailed by the author. And Ms. Gertler's writing syle is adept, skillfully evoking a sense of place and time. She has the gift of taking readers into her character's hearts and minds, revealing nuances that might otherwise be missed.

The brilliant but distracted Professor Carl Larkin has always been reliable and predictable. When he leaves for work one morning and simply disappears, no one in his life can explain or understand such action. His wife of more than twenty years, Olivia, is frightened and confused. This is not the first time in her life a husband left and failed to return. She's never recovered from losing her first husband, Noah, in a robbery gone bad. In fact, her heart has never healed from that loss. Carl Larkin had tenderly courted Olivia when she was a young widow. Their marriage and life seemed stable. They'd raised two children together. Yet Olivia had lost her faith and bitterly given up on hope with the death of her first husband. At the time of Carl's disappearance, much remained unspoken between them despite their years together. Noah's memories had been too painful to examine so remain compartmentalized.

Carl has wrestled with his secret demons for forty one years. No one has ever really known him. He's never shared his past with anyone, not even Olivia. Facing down that past is long overdue. Confronting secret truths takes Carl back to his southern roots where he reacquaints himself with his mother and first love, abandoned at age seventeen. His brief phone calls home to Olivia provide more questions than answers. Both fear their marriage will not survive the truths they need to share.

The story is told in an interesting way, from first Olivia's and then Carl's point of view. This technique added depth and dimension to the plot as it unfolds. Carl wonders if he can retrieve the lifetime he lost at a young age. While absent from Olivia, he tries to put his life back together in an effort to be whole again. And Olivia finally heals a heart that has been faltering for twenty five years. Both learn the heartbreak that comes of holding onto and letting go of the past. But will their revelations bind them closer together or tear them apart?

This is a satisfying and well written tale of love, loss, family, and the trials that strengthen us as humans if we let them. Gertler fans will not be disappointed in this latest book. Her characters are real, the emotions honest. Readers not familiar with her work should consider adding The Windmill to their reading list.



Rating:
Summary: Another good book by Stephanie Gertler
Review: The Windmill by Stephanie Gertler
Courtesy of WWW.Loveromances.com
November 10, 2004

The name Stephanie Gertler is a name this reviewer has come to welcome when it comes to books. Her previous novel, DRIFTING, left such an impact that the offer to read THE WINDMILL could not be turned away. In Gertler's most recent novel, two people come together and live a life as husband and wife, after enduring tragedy and loss with a previous relationship. What gets the book moving is the realization that one of them has not been completely truthful about the past, and has been living a lie all these years.

The novel begins in the present, with Olivia (Livi) learning that her husband, Carl, has disappeared. She sees him in the morning, as he is getting ready for work. However, she finds out that he never shows up at the University, where he is the Chairman of the Department of Physics. If it were some other man, Olivia may not have been in a panic, but Carl was not one to deviate from his planned schedules, and he would have let her know one way or another if he had to leave on an emergency. It is truly unlike him even to be late for work. The thought of him having an affair occurs to her for a brief second, but she finds that idea totally unrealistic, and feels that something awful has happened to him instead.

As the day wears on, Olivia is as worried as she can be, but when she finds the note he had left for her that morning, she at least is comforted with the knowledge that he will be returning to her soon. Her life is now turned upside down, and she reflects on her own past and the love that she lost many years ago.

Olivia and Carl Larkin are now in their fifties, with two grown children and a happy marriage. But both of them have a star-crossed past. Olivia fell in love with Noah years ago, and with Carl's disappearance, she begins to think about her past with Noah, a love that should have lasted a lifetime. It is a love that is romantic and at the same time tragic, as the reader will cry with Olivia as she remembers her life with a man that she had so much passion for, and had had such big dreams with.

In the meantime, Carl is travelling back to his hometown, hoping to get closure on a past that he ran away from so many years ago. It is a past that no one in his current life is aware of, including Olivia. Carl hopes that Olivia's love for him will help them get through this, as Carl plans to tell Olivia everything when he returns home to Cape Cod. What he plans on telling her is going to be so shocking, that he knows he may end up losing her in the end.

Words cannot describe the writing of Stephanie Gertler. It is not just the story lines that make her novels feel like magic, but it is the way she tells her stories. The backdrop of Cape Cod helps add to the mood of THE WINDMILL, Cape Cod representing a time in Olivia's life where she felt protected and happy. Cape Cod is where she returns after she loses Noah, and it is where she seeks comfort with her parents after Carl disappears. The setting of New York takes the reader to Noah and Olivia's romance, the excitement of first love, and the newness of a life together. And while Olivia and Carl seem to be happy in their married life together in Massachusetts, the college town represents a different time and life, a life that is more staid, more down to earth. This reviewer could feel the difference in tone between the different time periods, and Olivia and Carl's life together seemed to be covered in a false security, as if they were acting a part and not truly living as they should have been. With Carl's plan to reveal his secrets, he is giving himself and Olivia a chance to come clean, and to start fresh with a new outlook on life. Gertler did a good job at developing these characters as she did, showing that they were not flat characters but people that grow and develop as they are influenced by those around them. THE WINDMILL, a beautifully written story that will live on in the minds of its readers, is highly recommended.