Eloquently written . . . Moore has great strengths as a writer, chiefly in her powers of description. . . . [In February she] provides vivid, cinematic snapshots of family life . . . [and] a woman’s return from the long exile of her grief.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Lisa Moore’s artfully fragmented narrative movingly reflects Helen’s shattered psyche. But like a ray of wintry sunshine piercing the ocean fog, the novel’s conclusion holds out hope that frozen hearts can thaw and even made-up minds can be changed.”—The Boston Globe
“[An] extraordinary, unusually philosophical and human novel.”—The Irish Times
“Assured . . . [with] supple, graceful prose . . . Moore's firm grip and fine craft make something special from this novel of disaster and its aftermath.”—The Independent (UK)
“Lisa Moore can do impressive things with plain language.”—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“Quietly reflective . . . Evocative . . . Expressive.”—Publishers Weekly
“Moore offers us, elegantly, exultantly, the very consciousness of her characters. In this way, she does more than make us feel for them. She makes us feel what they feel, which is, I think, the point of literature and maybe even the point of being human. . . . [Lisa Moore] gets life. . . . Exquisitely mindful . . . Luminous.”—The Globe and Mail
“Deftly executed and moving.”—The Star (Toronto)
“Emotional tension, coupled with an acute eye for regional setting and dialect, has long been a hallmark of Moore’s work. . . . [February] is hauntingly beautiful . . . [and its] subtle styling, sparse dialogue and sombre tone succeed at shining a light not only upon the impact of the Ocean Ranger disaster, but also upon the lasting aftermath of death itself. . . . Moore pens another triumph.”— The Chronicle Herald (Canada)
“Moore’s ability to write originally and passionately about love and death relies on her eye for detail and her psychologically acute portrayals. This may be beautiful writing, but it is never without the necessary bit that makes it real.”—Scottish Herald
“Glowing . . . Elegant . . . It has been a joy indeed to discover Lisa Moore.”— The Telegraph (UK)
“[Moore] turns a sad story simply told into a minor-key triumph. . . . A novel which takes a moment of catastrophe and focuses not on the moment itself but on all the moments that surround it; that are altered, subtly or dramatically, by it. . . . A novel that stands as a candid atomization of mourning in all its endlessness and banality.”—The Guardian
“This profoundly moving, beautifully written book describes in painful detail the aftermath of loss and the ways in which people manage to cope with life’s most extreme events.”—Waterstones Book Quarterly (UK)
“Life in the pages of Lisa Moore’s glorious new novel feels more real than it does in the world we inhabit. . . . Her vital, original imagery startles us into her characters’ consciousness: She forces us to engage the world around us with an intimacy we tend to avoid. . . . It is the peculiar aptness, of Moore’s images—which are the individual perceptions of an idiosyncratic mind—that fuel her astounding literary gift. . . . Moore [presents a] wise equation: that love plus loss equals life. Her vision of the world is bitter and joyful; angry and generous. And true. Very true.”—The Montreal Gazette
“A powerful novel for its insight into emotional endurance, and how life goes on even as tragedy leaves broken slivers of hearts in its wake. . . . Loneliness is hard to write about without becoming maudlin or clichéd. But Moore seems to understand this very human facility, describing the unconscious ways we sometimes try to avoid feeling overwhelmed by it. . . . Incredibly empathetic . . . There’s an economy about Moore’s style that allows us to fully see how a once vibrant life can be whittled down by a pain and loneliness that is far too deep to communicate, but by grounding her writing in the physical world, Moore shows how life’s everyday tasks and encounters create a comforting continuity that eventually wears down emotional pain to allow forward movement.”—The Ottawa Citizen
“Moore’s writing resembles poetry. . . . She expertly captures her characters’ physical surroundings in sharp-edged fragments of color and sensation . . . [and] probes their emotional landscapes gently and thoroughly. . . . A marvelous book.”— Winnipeg Free Press
“A perfectly pitched novel.”—Woman&Home (UK)
“This mesmerizing book is full of tears, and is a graceful meditation on how to survive life’s losses.”—Marie Claire (UK)
“Lisa Moore’s heart-warming second novel is domestic fiction at its finest.”—Daily Mail (UK)
“Skillfully structured . . . [A] delicate, involving novel.”—The Daily Express (UK)
Moore has great strengths as a writer, chiefly in her powers of description. She gives us the cold, steep streets of St. John's in its many wintry incarnations and well-observed scenes of Iceland and Tasmania, where John travels, as well as glimpses of his business meetings and chance encounters in New York…Throughout, Moore provides vivid, cinematic snapshots of family life before and after Helen's husband's death…
—The New York Times
The story of the man who never comes back from sea has been embedded in the lore of eastern Canada. Moore's third work of fiction (after Alligator) imagines the impact one such disaster—the 1982 sinking of the Ocean Ranger—has on Helen O'Mara, a mother of three small children whose husband, Cal, dies at sea. The narrative jumps in time from Helen's life with Cal, the accident itself and the years after in which Helen tries to keep her life intact. Whether it is Helen longing for companionship, designing wedding dresses or learning yoga, everything she does is done with a view to Cal. Most scenes are quietly reflective, and Moore's strength is her ability to inject evocative images and expressive tones to otherwise static and overly earnest passages (as in “Is this what a life is? Someone, in the middle of cleaning the bathroom, remembers you tasting the ocean on your fingers long after you're gone.”) There's no plot—the narrative consists of fragments from Helen's life—and while some readers may find the patchwork engaging, the absence of a through-line makes the work meandering. (Feb.)
Moore, the prize-winning novelist of the debut novel Alligator, is back with her second offering, a quiet and involving piece that takes us on Helen O'Mara's inner journey through grief. On Valentine's Day, 1982, Helen's husband, Cal, drowned when his oil rig sank in a tempest off the coast of Newfoundland (an actual event). It's been over 25 years, and Helen is still haunted by that dark day and by the life she and her husband shared. Her days and nights flood with memories. In fact, Helen has been with Cal in death for a quarter of a century, reliving the tragedy, imagining what Cal's final hours were like, trying to stick by him in spirit even as he slips down into the unforgiving sea and breathes his last. Perhaps a late-night call from her grown son promising a new life coming into the world can catalyze Helen into finding a way to heal and to move on with her own life. VERDICT Elegantly written and as tangible as the material world in the present moment, this work is recommended for popular reading. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]—Jyna Scheeren, NYPL
Canadian novelist Moore (Alligator, 2006) conveys a widow's solitude in a narrative composed of fragments and anecdotes ranging across decades. When her husband Cal died in the sinking of the oil rig Ocean Ranger off the Newfoundland coast in 1982, Helen O'Mara was 30. Cal left her with three young children, a fourth on the way, and over the ensuing decades Helen soldiered on with a facade of equanimity. The book begins in late 2008. These days Helen has plenty of pastimes: travel, yoga, sewing wedding dresses. She's having long-postponed renovations done to her house, a decision that allows her to share domestic space with a carpenter she lingers near but doesn't much interact with. She's also embroiled to varying degrees in her adult children's lives. But her grief for Cal is still both torment and touchstone, the source of her life's sweetest, most enduring connection and its most lacerating solitude. Helen's focus is intensely retrospective, and the novel relies heavily on flashbacks that extend to that awful night in 1982 and beyond. Moore enlivens her mostly plotless narrative by deploying poignant detail; Helen is a sensitive observer, especially attuned to those who, like her, seem isolated and laconic. Though her life has been hard, the mood here is oddly upbeat. Helen's loneliness began in grief and shock, continued in tribute, grew to habit, and finally hardened into identity-it's not without its solaces, even its sub rosa pleasures. A quarter-century later, Helen is everywhere attended by her perpetually 31-year-old husband, whose body never ages and whose memory never fades. Subtle and perceptive, but offering little respite from a sometimes monotonous tone of lyricalearnestness.
