TUESDAY POTPOURRI: INTROS/TEASERS — FLORA — JUNE 4

 

 

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, from Tuesday/First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Should Be Reading.

Today’s feature is an ARC I received from Amazon Vine:  Flora, by Gail Godwin, is the story of a unique relationship between a child and her caretaker.

 

Intro:  There are things we can’t undo, but perhaps there is a kind of constructive remorse that could transform regrettable acts into something of service to life.

That summer, Flora and I were together every day and night for three weeks in June, all of July, and the first six days of August.  I was ten, going on eleven, and she was twenty-two.  I thought I knew her intimately.  I thought I knew everything there was to know about her, but she has since become a profound study for me, more intensely so in recent years.  Styles have come and gone in storytelling, psychologizing, theologizing, but Flora keeps providing me with something as enigmatic as it is basic to life, as timeless as it is fresh.

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Teaser:  …Later that summer I told someone Flora was simpleminded, but he said he thought I must mean simple-hearted.

Something had been left out of her, but was that something her virtue or her deficit? (p. 47)

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Blurb:  Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen’s decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II.At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died.A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories.Flora, her late mother’s twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

This darkly beautiful novel about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw and also harks back to Godwin’s memorable novel of growing up, The Finishing School. With its house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, Flora tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can’t undo.It will stay with readers long after the last page is turned.

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Would you keep reading?  I know that I’m intrigued.