Synopsis
In a tale that resonates with heartfelt emotion, Anne LeClaire weaves a spellbinding story of tragic endings and hopeful beginnings in Entering Normal . When 20-year-old Opal leaves her hometown with her five-year-old son to escape her overbearing family and the child's young and seemingly indifferent father, she settles in the Massachusetts town of Normal. Living next door is Rose Nelson, a mother who's been mourning the death of her teenaged son for six years. Opal and Rose couldn't be more different, and Rose's first impressions of Opal and her lifestyle are hardly flattering, particularly when Opal starts seeing the town's bad boy. But when Opal is forced to fight against both her parents and her ex-boyfriend in a custody battle, Rose becomes an unlikely ally. For, in the end, it's not their differences that matter, but the one thing they share in common -- the fierce and undeniable love of a mother for her child.
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Review
In Anne D. LeClaire's Entering Normal, two women are bound by the shared trials of motherhood: birth, hope, separation, and grief. Though Rose Nelson is an older woman still mourning her son, who died five years ago, and Opal Gates is a young single mother scrabbling to raise her 5-year-old son, the two women begin to cleave together.
Both move through their worlds in a dreamlike trance, only surfacing above their own self-absorption when confronted by the violence of life: infidelity, passion, jealousy, and death. Though emotionally clueless men bumble around Rose and Opal, they are never able to pierce through these women's barriers. Rose and Opal are too convinced of their own needs--Opal believes she needs no one, while Rose focuses only on her dead son. As the two begin to find each other, the reader awaits the moments of growth that allow them to see beyond themselves. As Rose entertains hope, so does the reader, "In the morning light, for one brief moment, she ... can almost believe that she has already experienced her lifetime's allotment of pain and grief." LeClaire's skill for describing human action succeeds here as well, as her characters fail and triumph with realistic probability. Alternately melodious and emotionally torturous, Almost Normal is a moving debut. --Nancy R.E. O'Brien
About the Author
Anne D. LeClaire is a novelist and short story writer who teaches and lectures on writing and the creative process. She has also worked as a radio broadcaster, a journalist, an op-ed columnist for The Cape Cod Times, and a correspondent for The Boston Globe. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Redbook, and Yankee magazine among others. She is the mother of two adult children and lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
From the Hardcover edition.
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