Rating: 
Summary: rare, powerful, and wise
Review: Jessica Treadway's novel, And Give You Peace, does just that. Somehow this immensely talented and wise writer leads us through the excrutiating pain of a family tragedy and, without artifice, brings the narrator--and us--to a hard won but genuine peace.
Rating: 
Summary: Pleeeeease
Review: Looks like all of the author's friends from Massachusetts have written in to boost up this pale, boring book. Graywolf has made reputation for publishing some of the most middlebrow fiction in America! This one fits right in. If you want to be unchallened when you read, and bored to death to boot, then I suppose I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: This is not a writer
Review: Not really distinctive, but okay. The details were good while the overall plot was predictable. Much better than Dive From Claussen's Pier in terms of a family melodrama.
Rating: 
Summary: I liked it
Review: Not really distinctive, but okay. The details were good while the overall plot was predictable. Much better than Dive From Claussen's Pier in terms of a family melodrama.
Rating:
Summary: Truth and Memory
Review: So many authors like to spike their book with horrific tragedy as a hook, the better to reel us in and fascinate us. What I admire about And Give You Peace is that Treadway is more interested with bookending such event, showing us the family portrait before and after it was ripped to shreds, and the small and mundane ways in which define ourselves, and our families, and how those memories serve or trap us when we necessarily try to put a life together again. This novel sneaks in and whallops you with control and subtlety which will leave you stunned and, undoubtedly,impressed.
Rating:
Summary: Approaching the impossible truth
Review: There is a moment of intimate shock in Jessica Treadway's novel AND GIVE YOU PEACE where the narrator, eldest sister of three, breaks out of the third-person convention into direct address to her reader. "Do you know that hymn?" she asks, as with her mother and surviving sister she makes her way to the graves of her father and the little sister he has murdered at the start of this riveting, heartbreaking story of family love. "The words move across the music with a sharp, sweet pain, which, once you've felt it, stays as memory in your bones: The Lord bless you and keep you, / The Lord lift his countenance upon you, / . . . The Lord make his face to shine upon you, / And give you peace." In that brief and unrepeated narrative break Treadway holds her reader naked against this story's almost unbearable pulse, branding it into bone-memory too.AND GIVE YOU PEACE begins by relating the unspeakable and then unfolds like a long, confidential murmur to an intimate friend -- filled with bitchy asides, hilariously observed detail, and unreplicable sisterly lore -- which its listener never wants to stop. Anastasia Dolan needs us to know the whole story if we are to understand, finally, the worst of it; so she moves us matter-of-factly back from the day her father snapped, and into the sweet thicket of family connection that binds the Dolans close in its thorny embrace. ("We are the Dolans, mighty mighty Dolans," they sing on car trips, echoing the cheer.) And as we hear the details -- the father's compulsions about contagious disease, the girls' rivalries, the way the mother accommodates and compromises them all -- a picture of love emerges so truthful that even the most repugnant fact, in the end, can yield a kind of peace. Treadway's ability to pull this off -- to render joy through unimaginable pain -- starts with her masterful narrative choice to give us the bad news first. Going back from there, she unearths everything we'll need to go on. And so when the narrator turns her voice nakedly to us at the cemetery -- "Do you know that hymn?" -- we flinch in recognition, and then enter the grieving circle, willingly or not. We are the Dolans, too, approaching impossibility one step at a time, singing our sad triumphant song into the past and into the possible future.
Rating:
Summary: This is not a writer
Review: This is a person using writing for therapy. It is obvious that she has experienced some trauma in her life and is writing to come to grips with her past. I have read so many wonderful books that are first novels and in these there is so much talent and imagination and good writing. Not so in Ms Treadway's first attempt. Perhaps she can improve, but she first needs to learn what good writing really is.
Rating:
Summary: hard to justify
Review: Treadway's a writer with a distinctive voice and deft eye for detail. However, she lamely and shamefully transposes a real life tragedy from Bethlehem, NY in 1982. Call it lazy writing as well; she changes the name of the town but retains so many actual place names and school details from Bethlehem that you have to wonder why she didn't just opt for a Jon Krakauer sort of non-fiction account instead. As for the adaptation of the actual murder-suicide, Treadway takes huge liberties. In short, her novel reads like a sensationalized episode of Law and Order, "ripped from the headlines." For those who lived in the town and knew the family (I was a classmate of the girl who was murdered by her deranged father), this so-called "novel" offers no peace; it prompts disgust.
Rating:
Summary: It will move you
Review: Very rarely can a novel bring me to tears--this one did. Treadway's story of a family trying to piece together the clues of an unthinkable tragedy works like a mystery-in-reverse. Though we know the outcome at the start, rather than simply flashback to find the clues, the story instead moves forward, following the characters as they struggle to go on with their lives. This forward movement, in turn, provides the backdrop and the impetus for investigation of the past. In this forward-yet-backward movement, Treadway masterfully keeps us riveted in the what-will-happen, while at the same time engaging us in the mystery of the what-did-happen. It's a fresh and interesting way to build a narrative, and kept me rapt from the first page through the last. Not only is it artfully constructed, it also has amazing emotional depth--I cried not for the characters, but for myself, because I had BECOME the characters. Treadway has such a beat on the pulse of human nature that the reader slips effortlessly into the world of the novel, recognizing one's own thoughts, feelings, quirks and actions on every page. Though few people can say they have experienced the same tragedy as this family, the feelings and behaviors of the characters are so real, so everyday, that it's impossible not to experience the characters themselves. It's a wonderful novel and acheives the rare combination of literary mastery with page-turning pace. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys excellent fiction of any genre.
|
