The Girl Who Never Left by Alison Stuart; More Character and Less Mystery

 

The Girl Who Never Left by Alison Stuart; More Character and Less Mystery 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

Spoilers: Despite the marketing towards The Girl Who Never Left by Alison Stuart focuses on a mystery, the mystery is probably the least important aspect of it. Instead it is the character development of a woman exploring a new life after the death of her husband.

Helen Morrow’s husband Charlie is killed in The Great War/WWI. Instead of returning to her native Australia, she moves into her late husband's family estate, Holdston. Helen befriends her mother in law, Evelyn and Paul, Charlie's cousin who suffers from his own war ghosts. Helen finds an old diary written by an ancestor of Paul and Charlie's depicting an unhappy marriage and some dark secrets. Helen and Paul investigate the diary's revelations as they fall in love and deal with their own traumas.

By far the most fascinating aspects of the book are Helen and Paul’s post-war struggles. It's hard to live in the present when the past is so brutal and violent.

Helen is forced to live her life in a new place surrounded by strangers. She is far from Australia and constantly feels like she is being judged. She feels out of place in her late husband's wealthy home. The formidable Lady Evelyn, Charlie's mother, hovers between domineering matriarch and welcoming grandmotherly type. Helen isn't sure whether she is welcome or not.

She makes some good friends though. Servants Sarah and Sam Pollard provide steady sources of comfort and understanding for the bereaved widow. She befriends Tony, a titled childhood friend of Charlies’, who develops an attraction to her. Her daughter, Alice thrives in Holdston.

What makes Helen’s journey profound is that of a WWI era widow starting her life over again. Even though she is in the grip of grief, depression, and mental anguish, she keeps it suppressed for Alice's sake. Being an impoverished single woman in the early 20th century, Helen can only depend on the charity of her in-laws to survive. It is a desperate situation and the reader is made to feel and understand it.

Besides Helen’s story, we also get a parallel subplot featuring Paul, Charlie's cousin and Helen's soon to be love interest. If Helen has the stress of living among strangers, Paul has to face the pain of coming home. He has to return to a life that remains the same while he came face to face with trauma, violence, and death. He would rather study archaeology in places like Mesopotamia than go home and face a family that loves him but can't understand what he is going through.

He has PTSD flashbacks of his time on the Front particularly with Charlie. He weighs his guilt, memories, shame, and anxieties of what he did and didn't do and the aftermath of those actions. Paul can't adjust to life back at home with so much baggage surrounding him.

The mystery that surrounds the book concerns an unhappy marriage, domestic violence, and the division between living one's truth and doing one's duty. It thematically shares much with the rest of the book but really it is not as important as Helen and Paul’s plots. The book could just as easily have gone without it.

Instead of focusing on a mystery, the book's true strength lies in the personal journeys of two people who have to start their lives over after being faced with death and the senseless violence of war.

The Sunflower Widows by Matthew Fults; Building Community Through War and Grief

 

The Sunflower Widows by Matthew Fults; Building Community Through War and Grief 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

This review is also on Reedsy Discovery.

Spoilers: War brings many victims not just those who were killed but in the survivors especially those who have lost loved ones during war. For the friends and family members, the loss brings long term grief and sorrow. Even when the reasons to go into war are understandable, it still brings violence, death, and heartache. Sometimes the only things that a survivor can do is continue and find positive means of survival. One of the ways is to form a community of those who have had similar experiences so they can share their loss together. That's what happens to the women in Matthew Fults’ novel, The Sunflower Widows.

The Sunflower Widows tells the story of four women from a small Ukrainian village who have lost husbands and other loved ones in battle, particularly during the recent Russo-Ukrainian War. They meet at the home of Kathryna, an elderly woman who is familiar with death and grief. She befriends three younger widows, Yulia, a newlywed, Anna, a middle aged wife of a career soldier, and Natalya, a suddenly single mother. They form a network of support, understanding, and love.

The women's stories are individually told through flashbacks that focus on their lives and relationships before the war then moves to the present as they form a tight bond of sisterhood that encourages laughter, tears, empathy, and understanding. They are fascinating characters coming into their own separate lives before they come together as a group.

Their past stories are moving, detailed, emotional, and sometimes even funny. For example, Yulia and her husband Maksym have a meet-cute when she and her female friends have a flirting match with him and his male friends. In their one and one battle of words, they both emerge as the winners because they agree to date. The date blossoms into a relationship that evolves into a happy marriage for a time.

The flashbacks feature memories that become precious because they are gone. Even the most mundane of activities carry significance that they didn’t before. Anna’s grief is haunted by conversations that were started but never finished about how she and Borys saw their future particularly with or without children.

Their past memories parallel with their new normal in which they have to live without their loved ones.Natalya tries to put up a brave front for her infant son while her world falls apart around her as she mourns her husband, Dmitryo’s death. Her conflicts in being present for her son while wanting to withdraw into herself and her memories are understandable and relatable especially by those who have experienced similar loss. 

They don’t even have to be widows to understand the pain that these women go through. Kathryna herself was unmarried but is no stranger to death. As a child, her father was killed in WWII before she had the chance to really know him. She empathizes with these women because her mother went through the same process.

Because the characters are at different stages in life, the deaths feel like an interruption of what would be a normal process of one life transition to another. Yulia wanted to have a longer marriage to Maksym than the one that ended early and abruptly. Anna was looking forward to Borys’s retirement and spending her twilight years with him. Natalya now has a child, Zdeno, who will grow up never knowing his father, Dmitryo. Putin robbed them all of those chances when his Russian Army invaded their country.

The cause of the war is to fight against the invaders and for Ukraine to maintain its independent sovereignty. The four women understand that and want to live in a country free of invaders and Russian authority disrupting their cities, homes, routines, and daily lives. But agreeing with the cause doesn’t make the grief any less bearable and their husbands any less missed. This acknowledgement of courage and sacrifice can be seen when Kathryna lays out two more chairs when she meets the other three women. The reason that she sets the two empty chairs is because “there will always be widows.” 

The Sunflower Widows has a strong theme of community and togetherness. In their mutual grief, the four women are there for each other. They listen to each other’s stories offering tea and conversation. The other women hold and sit for Zdeno becoming honorary aunts. They encourage each other to change jobs and relocate if they have to. They wipe away one another’s tears and wrap their arms around each other with loving embraces. 

In collaborating and communicating with each other and inviting other mourners , the Sunflower Widows learn that while grief never really goes away, there can always be something positive found in sharing it and helping others.