Publishers Weekly
"This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.... This is my story, my giving of thanks." So begin the reflections of Hannah Coulter, the twice-widowed protagonist of this slim, incandescent novel in Berry's Port William series. In 1940, the precocious, innocent Hannah leaves her small Kentucky farming town to work as a secretary in nearby Hargrave, where she meets Virgil Feltner, seven years her senior, who gently courts her. They marry and have a daughter, but Virgil, "called to the army in 1942," dies in the Battle of the Bulge. Love follows mourning, as a kind but driven farmer, Nathan Coulter, returns from combat and woos Hannah. In delicate, shimmering prose, Berry tracks Hannah's loves and losses through the novel's first half; the narrative sharpens as Hannah recounts her children's lives-Margaret becomes a schoolteacher with a troubled son; Mattie ("a little too eager to climb Fool's Hill") flees rural life to become a globe-trotting communication executive; Caleb, Nathan's hope to run the family farm, becomes a professor of agriculture instead. Beneath the story of ordinary lives lies the work of an extraordinarily wise novelist: as Hannah relates her children's fate to her own deeply rooted rural background, she weaves landscape and family and history together ("My mind... is close to being the room of love where the absent are present, the dead are alive, time is eternal and all creatures prosperous"). Her compassion enlivens every page of this small, graceful novel. (Nov. 21) Forecast: Berry's reputation as a moralist may put off some readers, but those looking for an impassioned, literary vision of American rural life and values will find much to appreciate. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
T.S. Elliot Award®-winning author Berry's series set in the imaginary town of Port William, KY, and begun in 1960 with the story of Nathan Coulter comes full circle with this offering containing the reminiscences of his widow, Hannah. Now alone on her farm, Hannah recounts her life starting with her Depression-era childhood. Narrator Susan Denaker (The Double Bind) manages to impart the feeling that the listener is seated across from Hannah at her kitchen table as she tells her story, making this audio edition extremely successful. Highly recommended for fiction collections in all public, academic, and church libraries. [Audio clip available through www.christianaudio.com.-Ed.]
—Nancy Reed
Kirkus Reviews
A continuation of Berry's Port William, Kentucky, saga (Jayber Crow, 2000, etc.), this one told from the perspective of an elderly farmwife looking back on her life and world. Hannah Coulter comes from that long-past generation of rural Americans who fully expect their lives to pass as uneventfully as their parents' and grandparents' and God only knows how many ancestors' before them. A girl during the hard years of the Great Depression, Hannah experiences want at an early age and learns to make do with little and hope for even less. After growing up on a farm, and after high school, she goes to work as a secretary for a local lawyer and marries her landlady's nephew Virgil, who gives her one daughter just before he goes overseas in WWII and dies in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, she marries Nathan, another veteran, who comes from humbler circumstances but works hard to make a living on a small Port William farm for his wife and stepdaughter and their two subsequent sons. Her story takes in the better part of the late 20th century and amounts to a kind of elegy for the starkly beautiful country life that Hannah had always taken for granted but came to love all the more as it faded into history, victim of economic and social change. Her three children all make their way through college and drift from home to become academics and entrepreneurs, while Nathan is more and more hard-pressed to keep the farm running. When he eventually dies of cancer, Hannah thinks the book has finally closed on the Coulter farm-but last-minute help from an expected quarter gives hope to the possibility that a new generation will take charge of the family legacy. Atmospheric and quietly moving: a talethat manages to avoid outright bathos as it makes its way along the narrow boundary between memoir and nostalgia.
NOVEMBER 2008 - AudioFile
Susan Denaker gives authenticity to 70-year-old Hannah Coulter and other Port William, Kentucky, residents as Hannah reminisces about her life and those she loved. Denaker adjusts vocal tones and timbre to depict Hannah's life from childhood through young love, motherhood, and old age. She gives an age-appropriate narration of a life sketched in a broad outline. Her portrayal of Hannah as self-sufficient, fiery, and fiercely independent captures Hannah's spirit and the often-chaotic times she lived in. From her early years, in which she suffers Depression era poverty, the loss of her beloved mother, and the arrival of a jealous stepmother, to her senior years, Hannah remains steadfastly determined to shape her own destiny. Fans of Berry's fiction won't be disappointed. G.D.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
