Goldengrove

This first-person novel begins with 13-year-old Nico admiring her sister Margaret's rich, throaty singing. Narrator Mamie Gummer gives Nico a strong, rough-edged voice, conveying a depth and promise equal to the gifts she praises. Gummer's unhurried reading depicts a leisurely summer day before sister Margaret leaves for college. The girls float in a boat, Nico sleeps, and the listener is lulled. Then Gummer shifts speeds, dramatizing Margaret's sudden drowning and life's instantaneous changes. The rest of Gummer's narration is filled with pauses--as if Nico is trying to find a break from grief and to consider more carefully the potential pain in her relationship with her sister's artistic boyfriend. Gummer's pauses also give listeners time to appreciate the wry humor that saves the story from becoming maudlin. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

May 12, 2008
In Prose's deeply touching and absorbing 15th novel, narrator Nico, 13, comes upon Gerard Manley Hopkins's “Spring and Fall” (which opens “Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?”) in her father's upstate New York bookstore, also named Goldengrove. It's the summer after her adored older sister, Margaret—possessed of beauty, a lovely singing voice and a poetic nature—casually dove from a rowboat in a nearby lake and drowned. In emotive detail, Nico relates the subsequent events of that summer. Nico was a willing confidant and decoy in Margaret's clandestine romance with a high school classmate, Aaron, and Nico now finds that she and Aaron are drawn to each other in their mutual bereavement. Unhinged by grief, Nico's parents are distracted and careless in their oversight of Nico, and Nico is deep in perilous waters before she realizes that she is out of her depth. Prose eschews her familiar satiric mode. She fluidly maintains Nico's tender insights into the human condition as Nico comes to discover her own way of growing up and moving on.

Starred review from December 15, 2008
The summer her older sister, Margaret, drowns, 13-year-old Nico, her parents, and Margaret's boyfriend, Aaron, each plunge into lonely cells of inconsolable grief. When Aaron reaches out to Nico, she's left to interpret the high school senior's increasingly creepy overtures on her own. The adolescent dialog by Prose, winner of the 2008 Edith Wharton Achievement Award for Literature and a 2004 New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age honoree (for "After"), resounds with authenticity. Actress Mamie Gummer (Meryl Streep's daughter) conveys Nico's innocence and vulnerability without sentimentality. Recommended both for public library YA and adult fiction collections. [Also available from Recorded Bks. 7 CDs. library ed. unabridged. 8 hrs. ISBN 978-1-4361-5845-9. $92.75; audio clip available through www.harperaudio.com; the Harper hc received a starred review, "LJ" 7/08.Ed.]Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo

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