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The most tragic loss a parent can suffer is the death of a child. All that potential life and possibility, dead forever. It’s a crippling blow and the grief is an abyss, going
down and down forever…
This is the loss Jenna suffers, the death of her daughter, Sophie. Worse, Sophie is killed in the terrorist bombing of a nightclub in Bali. In her first flush of young
adulthood, Sophie left her American college campus to meet Robert, the Australian man she loves, for a romantic rendezvous. Jenna is devastated by the loss. She
and her ex-husband, Mark, have been estranged for years, but they still have a sexual hold on each other and he comes to Bali when he learns of Sophie’s death, the
first time in years he has “been there” for his daughter.
This author knows about how it feels to lose a loved one — how keen the edge of that knife, how the survivor believes she should have died instead. Scenes such as
Jenna’s meeting with Sophie’s boyfriend Robert, who survived the bombing, ring true. She thinks he should have died too. She asks herself why didn’t he save her?
She can barely bring herself to talk to him.
After the meeting with her ex, Mark, and the usual result, (they end up in bed together) Jenna flees to her new lover, Tim, who is eleven years younger than she. But
she can’t stay with him either. She runs again, this time to her mother, Lois, and sister, Jolie, in Arizona. There she gets another shock: she is pregnant again, and she
thinks Mark is the father. Jenna is good at running. When Mark left her for another woman, she fled into Sophie’s life, making her daughter the reason for her
existence. At Sophie’s death, she flees to her ex-husband’s arms, then to her lover’s, then to her sister and her mother. With the pregnancy, she must make a
decision and she is racked by doubts. Should she keep this child? What if it grows up only to die, as Sophie did? Should she tell her mother about it — who has
been her strength all her life, or her sister, who longs for a baby but cannot have one? Jenna even fantasizes that the baby will be Sophie, reborn. She begins writing
a journal, letters to her lost daughter, telling her things she cannot speak of to the others.
The book’s simple yet elegant prose lets us feel for Jenna and sympathize with her. With sympathy she becomes a human being, as torn by doubts as any of us. The
book’s end and its climax happen together, when Jenna finally makes up her mind, and makes a decision about whom she loves. At that point, she takes direction of
her own life and begins to heal.
This is a good read; harrowing at the beginning, uplifting at the end. Inclán has also written other novels, including the bestseller, One Small Thing. An interview with
the author and a Conversation Guide called NAL Accent are included at the end. This must be a coming thing; writers making certain their readers “get the
message.” Inclán’s gives you something new, however: Karri Casner, to whom the book is dedicated, was a twenty-three-year-old American woman killed in the
real bombing of the Sari nightclub in Bali. “Like Sophie, Karri was just beginning her life. I thought about her often as I wrote,” Inclan says.
Reviewed by C.L. Rossman, author of Renegade The Hunter
www.bookreviewcafe.com
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