Review by New York Times Review
MICHELLE HOOVER'S first novel demonstrates how difficult it is to render a real person's life into fiction. As the Web site dedicated to the book explains, "The Quickening" was inspired by a journal written by Hoover's greatgrandmother, Melva Current, in the last years of her life. Loosely based on that telling, the novel recounts the hardships of two families on neighboring Midwestern farms during the Great Depression. In the opening chapter, Enidina Current, the character based on Hoover's ancestor, meets Mary Morrow, a reckless farm wife bored by life. These two couldn't be more different. Enidina is a "big woman, suited more for the farm than for marrying," while Mary is "stalk-straight," "pale-skinned" and not the type to "milk and slaughter and plow." While Enidina finds solace in the land, Mary answers to the call of the local church. Neither qualifies as good company for the other, but isolation forces them to stay in contact. Hoover alternates her chapters between Enidina's and Mary's points of view, implying that the novel will be primarily concerned with the relationship between the two women. But she also attempts to use historical events like the 1933 Hog Reduction Program (a controversial plan instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt to raise prices by paying farmers to kill off hogs, thereby reducing the surplus) to buoy the plot and add color to the characters' interactions. This merely diffuses the concentration on Enidina and Mary, and causes other characters to react in ways that seem extreme, even considering the historical background. Although it may seem unfair to measure Hoover's novel against the real account, so much of the book's publicity is geared toward the story behind the story that such comparisons feel invited. Hoover's Web site even provides a link to the actual journal, and it's easy to see why. Melva Current's original words are, in many ways, more engaging - and convincing - than the novel itself. She spends little more than a paragraph or two on any single memory, but her unsentimental anecdotes enliven the event or incident she happens to describe. Recalling the death of her younger sister in just two sentences, she still manages to communicate the confusion one feels when stricken by grief: "Shortly before I was 11 years old, our little Bertha died, and for a number of years I looked, or seemed to be looking for her. She never came back." The specificity of the prose - the way Melva Current refers to "our little Bertha" - creates a voice so distinct that we can't help trusting her. In Hoover's novel, the alternating narrators, Enidina and Mary, fail to embody that same authenticity. Enidina Current tells us that a farm was where she was born and "would always live," but she doesn't relate events with the same immediacy that's found in the journal. The demands of a novel differ, of course, from those of a writer recording her memories for herself and her family. Enidina's and Mary's recollections must function as plot points, while Melva Current was free simply to set down what happened. But instead of grounding her novel in that hardscrabble experience, Hoover embellishes upon it. As a result, "The Quickening" fails to tell the real story of how a woman like Melva suffered and persevered. Hoover's novel recounts the hardships of two rural families in the Depression. Sarah Fay is an editorial associate at The Paris Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 1, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
Hoover drew on a 15-page recollection left by her great-grandmother for this novel set in rural Iowa early in the last century. Enidina leaves a life of relative comfort when she marries Frank Current and moves with him to a hardscrabble farm, where they raise hogs, cows, and corn. Her initial loneliness is relieved somewhat when Mary Morrow, her nearest neighbor, pays a call. Mary's first words to Enidina are, Hard work, which aptly describes their lives. Although the two women are too different to become close friends, they establish a bond based on their mutual need for female company. Their personal trials Enidina loses several children, while Mary's husband, Jack, is abusive are set against a backdrop of unrelenting toil, made even more punishing as the country slides into the Great Depression. The novel is related by Enidina and Mary in alternating chapters, but their two voices aren't quite distinctive enough to make this narrative device a success. Hoover has succeeded, however, in creating a sense of what life was like for women in that time and place.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hoover's powerful debut tells the story of the intertwined fortunes of two early 20th-century Midwestern farm women. From the time Enidina Current and her husband, Frank, move into the hardscrabble farmhouse a day's wagon ride away from Enidina's family, their closest neighbors, Jack and Mary Morrow, perplex them, though their proximity and shared farm work often bring the two couples together. Sharing the narrative, stoic Enidina struggles through several miscarriages before finally bearing twins, while the more delicate Mary reels from disappointment, most of all in her volatile husband. Moving through the Depression, the families are driven farther apart from each other, even while Mary's youngest spends most of his time in the Current household, until an accident and a betrayal drive the final wedge into their lives. In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover's characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Hoover's engrossing debut novel opens in 1913 on the Upper Midwest plains, an unforgiving landscape for farmers Enidina and Frank Current and their neighbors Mary and Jack Morrow. Through the decades, Mary and Enidina's unique voices, presented alternately, pull us in to their harsh, dismal lives. Enidina, a coarse earth mother with fire-colored hair, tells her story as an old woman in heartfelt letters to an absent grandson so that he will understand her life as it once was and know the kind of people he came from, people who battled prairie fires, failed crops, treacherous neighbors, and the Great Depression. Her friendship with Mary begins badly because she doesn't like Mary's superior airs. In her passages, Mary tells of her own hopes and dreams, her longing for a clean, orderly place and not this farmstead full of mud and the smell of butchered animals. Mary tries to protect her three sons from her brutal husband, and while Jack has a place in the rhythm of the land, Mary finds solace only in the nearby chapel. VERDICT Borrowing from her own family history, Hoover burns away the glamour of the pioneer life, blending history and brilliant storytelling. This standout novel is highly recommended.-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The struggles and embroilments of neighboring farm households in the upper Midwest beginning in the summer of 1913 through the Great Depression, as narrated by the farmers' wives.From the beginning, Enidina Current, Eddie for short, is wary of Mary Morrow, and for good reasonthe misfortunes the Morrows visit on the Currents are nothing short of biblical. Mary plays the piano and seems ill at ease with the hand she's been dealt, hard work on the farm with her boys and her rough and sometimes abusive husband Jack.Mary is religious and plays more than just the piano in the lonesome white chapel their pastor, Borden, built with his father. Eddie's first pregnancy results in a miscarriageno small blow in a world where children mean the sort of additional labor that can make or break a farm. Somehow, even in this misfortune, there's the taint of blame. Far-flung as these individualistic farming families might be, judgment and gossip run rampant. Eddie's is the story of wrongdoing inflicted by the self-righteous on the innocent, of blame twisted from the doer onto the victim.Despite their initial aloofness, the families forge bonds when Eddie turns to Mary for help pending the birth of twins.The households intertwine when one of the Morrow boys, Kyle, whose sensitivity sets him apart from his ilk, becomes a regular fixture on the Current farm.When the Currents, who cannot abide waste, refuse to go along with the killing of pigs as mandated by a movement for solidarity among the region's farmers desperate to drive prices up, Jack takes matters into his own hands.Bloodshed foreshadows the ultimate penalty Eddie and her family will pay.The tale develops through the narration of both women from later in their lives, elucidating with dramatic irony the warped nature of the judgments and self-justifications of the devout in a community pushed to extremes by the Depression, where some go so far as to call cowardice bravery and to impose their own twisted fears on others.Hoover paints stormy scenes of individuals and communities at odds with one another and with their own dark histories in a vivid, pastoral panorama.Ultimately, this is the story of survivalhow life quickens and is borne on through turmoil, pain and perseverance. At times slow-moving, but imbued throughout with a careful and evenly wrought lyricism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
