Clair de Lune

January 9, 2012
Arriving nearly 50 years after her bestselling debut, The Moonflower Vine, Carleton’s (1913–1999) second novel is a witty and romantic portrait of a young Midwestern woman coming to grips with adulthood and the responsibilities that come with it. Miss Allen Liles, fresh out of college, is bound by expectations. Her dream is to venture to New York City and become a writer, but because that is far from practical, she takes what her mother believes is the safest path: a teaching job at a junior college. Wanting to do more than just get by, Allen decides to make her mark on the institution by teaching a seminar on the modern American novel. When Allen forms a strong bond with two of her students, continuing to discuss literature with them outside of the confines of the classroom, and then falls for one of them, she risks everything for love, which makes Carleton’s novel appear to be just another tale of a woman’s fall from grace. Luckily, it’s much more than that. While some of Allen’s mid-book interactions with secondary characters may seem extraneous, in the end, every character serves a purpose. Moreover, there are notable similarities between Allen’s America of 1941, and the America of today.

February 15, 2012
Newly discovered, the evocative fable of a young teacher's brush with professional disaster during a simpler-seeming era. Carleton, who died in 1999 and is known for a single, bestselling book, The Moonflower Vine (1962), also, it turns out, wrote another, set in 1941 and capturing a mood of youthful passion increasingly overshadowed by war. Allen Liles, 25 and fresh out of university, takes up a job teaching English at a small-town college in Missouri, a hiatus, she hopes, before moving to New York to become a writer. Two of her brightest students, George and Toby, fall into the habit of visiting her out of hours in her apartment, where the trio loses itself in poetry, music, ideas and heady enjoyment of the night. This chaste rhapsody of exuberant idealism leads to an even closer relationship between Allen and Toby, which breaks up before it is consummated. Nevertheless, the indiscretion has been noted, and Allen quickly realizes her foolishness, vulnerability and shame. With the support of the dean, she survives this near-catastrophe and tries to conform, yet the lure of the alternative is still with her. Fine and dry, with a faint flavor of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Carleton's vignette of innocence and experience has a bright wit and perceptive charm, rendered all the more enjoyable by its retro feel.

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February 1, 2012
Being a college teacher was not what Allen Liles wanted to do with her life, but as a young woman in 1941 Missouri, where people are still reeling from the horrors of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, her choices are limited, and she counts herself lucky just to have a job. When she befriends two male students, though, and love is in the air, her behavior comes under the scrutiny of school officials. With her future hanging in the balance, Allen realizes she must make a choice between the security of having a job and her desire to do something more profound. Carleton (191399) gives us a vivid picture of the American heartland on the eve of WWII in this story about facing responsibilities and following dreams. Those who enjoyed The Moonflower Vine (1962) will recognize her nostalgia for that earlier time mixed with her disappointment over the era's limitations, especially for women. Although the rhetoric feels dated in places, the authentic, fallible characters are what make this story both enjoyable and timeless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)