So Far Away by Meg Mitchell Moore ~by Emilee Weeks Ames

Hi folks,

This is my first guest post on Light and Set, and the second novel by Meg Mitchell Moore which I've read. (Check back soon for my post on the first novel, The Arrivals--which incidentally was her first novel too).

I'm noticing a phenomenon with Moore's novels... the first fifty pages in, my heart gets invested quickly but then recoils...I feel too closely what the characters are feeling -- so I set the book aside. Only to pick it back up a day or two later, too curious about the characters and budding plot to abandon the story. And then I move on to fall in great like with the novel.

Word of warning--there are no chapter divisions. For me, that required more resolve to find my own stopping place, set down the book, and recommence the next day. (Binge-reading numbs me similarly to binge-watching.)

Quick summary--two protagonists intersect in So Far Away, a 60-something year-old archivist (Kathleen) and a 13 year-old girl (Natalie) in search some moorings for their lives. Both women find themselves drawn into the memoir of a long-since-departed great-great-grandmother (Bridget) of Natalie, which reveals secrets which otherwise would have gone to the grave with her.

Both Natalie and Kathleen have their own crises to deal with: Kathleen with the persistent (suppressed) grief over losing her runaway teen daughter, and Natalie with plowing along, quite isolated, without help from her absent, separated parents too mired in their own lives/depression to parent her. This, added to Natalie being cyberbullied by her former best friend, drives Natalie to seek help deciphering the spidery writing in a black notebook she has found in her basement (we come to learn it is her distant relation's memoir).

First, I love the dual female protagonists and the intergenerational/ancestral connections with the journal.  I enjoyed getting to know Kathleen's quirks (cooking a gourmet meal when lonely) and inner monologue ("all around us, girls in danger"), and seeing her long-lost daughter through the eyes of memory. Natalie's inner world, her tenuous sense of self without any real ally (until Kathleen starts personally offering support to her), and her blow-off-the-adult-and-act-apathetic verbal manner with mis-stepping parents was very believable, and I felt great empathy for her. (This resulted in giving some imaginary lectures to her parents.) It was lovely and poignant to watch these two women, younger and older, tentatively get to know each other, then come to depend upon each other.

But there's really a triad of main characters, because Bridget's delightful memoir becomes a third character in its own right. It reminds me of how Anne Bronte similarly inserted another story into the main narrative in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (However, Moore keeps interjecting Natalie's breathless suspense into the reading of Bridget's account, which gets a bit annoying. Yes, author, we haven't forgotten that Natalie is here, doing the reading with the co-archivist, Neil.) I won't spoil her tale for you here; I hope you'll read it for yourself. 

I enjoyed the interplay of dramas of the supporting characters and their subplots. For me, the crux of the dramatic tension rippled through the pages when Kathleen and Natalie once again met, in crisis, with no guard up, and their whole stories came out--finally!--to each other. That was what each needed the most...(Natalie to Kathleen): Tell me your story. Tell me why you are guarded, responsible, shut down--and maybe I will find a thread connecting me to you. And Kathleen to Natalie: Tell me the truth about your mother, your father, your ex-friend, what's happening to you. And I because I love my disappeared daughter, I can't help but love you and will do my utmost to bridge the gap to wake the people in your world whom you need the most.

I loved how Kathleen realized she couldn't re-live her time with her daughter through her connection with Natalie...if only life were so simple. But she could be who she was: a darn good archivist who helped people fill in the gaps in their family tree, in their story, in their hearts. And I dearly loved Bridget's journal's last words after her scandalous confession therein--life keeps going, for that's what a life does.

Unless we tell our stories, they will go to the grave with us. But they live on if they are shared. They can do some good to those we share them with, even if (especially if) they include the "bad" parts...those things we have learned the most from because they cost us, or our beloved ones, the most. That resonates with me, and the tale was well told.

Thumbs up.

by Emilee Weeks Ames