As Hannah Pearl's memories of her 1940 escape to England from war-torn France come to the foreground of her consciousness, her memory of her more recent American life, including her relationships with her daughter and granddaughters, is almost erased. Her daughter, Miranda, attempts to bring her mother into the present and the daily activities of family life, yet finds herself instead pulled into Hannah's unresolved past. Miranda's daughters confront the shadows of history in their own ways. Fiona, content with her life as a new mother, tries to ignore the ghostly presence of Hannah's family who perished in the war, while Ida clings to Hannah's revelations as if they form a lifeline. Facing the mystery of Hannah's unspoken memories, each woman must ask how well anyone can know the inner life of another person.
Hannah Pearl lost her entire family in the Holocaust, escaped from France to England, married an RAF pilot, also killed in the war, and came to Connecticut to raise Miranda, their only daughter. Now in her 80s, with Alzheimer's advancing, the past, so long hidden from her family and herself, spills like vintage wine into her memories. By skillfully modulating her tone, Myra Platt frames Hannah's confused interior monologue within the world of her bewildered family. As they struggle to understand what is happening to their grandmother, she drifts deeper. Platt's gift for the perfect accent bridges Hannah's passage from the banal external world of Con-necticut--filled with nurses, drug store clerks, and granddaughters--to the rich but painful interior world of her French past and English husband. P.E.F. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Harriet Scott Chessman is the author of the acclaimed novels Ohio Angels, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper,, and Someone Not Really Her Mother, which are all available as Sound Library® audiobooks, as well as The Public Is Invited to Dance, a book about Gertrude Stein. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her family.
