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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Romance lovers, start your engines

Reviewed by: Maureen Scurfield

Posted: 08/28/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

The Good Daughters

By Joyce Maynard

William Morrow/HarperCollins, 288 pages, $25

There's nothing like a dramatic summer storm and a family skeleton to rattle your bones.

This seventh novel by American writer Joyce Maynard is one part romance, one part social commentary and two parts mystery.

It is a page-turning late-summer read. Women will eat it up.

Maynard is best known for 1992 novel To Die For, which became a Hollywood film starring Nicole Kidman.

Maynard's mother, by the way, was the Saskatchewan-born writer Fredelle Bruser Maynard, and her sister, Rona, was the longtime editor of Chatelaine magazine.

The Good Daughters starts with a hurricane and stalwart Edwin Plank, a rural volunteer fireman going out to clear a tree off the road for the arty and flighty Dickersons.

He makes it home soaked to the skin, but alive. Nine months later the story begins when two baby girls are born a few hours from each other in the same New Hampshire hospital on the same day in the '50s.

Connie and Edwin, who are straitlaced market gardeners, have little Ruth. Valerie and George Dickerson have Dana.

As the girls grow up, Connie pushes the dubious connection between the two girls and celebrates them as the "birthday sisters."

She doggedly continues, even when the Dickersons move away.

Maynard unspools her yarn in the alternating voices of Ruth and Dana. The only thing they have in common is a feeling of being on the outside looking in.

And putting up with Connie constantly pushing Ruth on Dana: "Your birthday sister," she liked to say. "You two girls got started in the world together. It only stands to reason we'd feel a connection."

They didn't. But like trees planted too close together, the boughs of the two families start to tangle as they reach maturity and secret starts pushing for release.

One wishes that Maynard had allowed more of the characters to tell their own story through dialogue instead of using so much description and retrospection.

Another minor weakness is the multiple denouement which is both too sad and too fortuitous to be entirely believable. (But, let's face it, diehard romantics will love it.)

You'll get your money's worth out of this novel. Maynard touches on themes of longing and belonging, illness, sexual desire and denial, art versus science, madness, old age and a deep love of the land.

This is absolutely the best time to read Maynard's book as market gardeners and farms are offering their produce at stands by the side of the road, echoing the lifestyle of the main family in the novel.

Maureen Scurfield writes the Miss Lonelyhearts and The Insider columns for the Free Press.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 28, 2010 H7

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