February - Softcover

Moore, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802170706 ISBN 13: 9780802170705

Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2010

Synopsis

February is Lisa Moore’s heart-stopping follow-up to her debut novel, Alligator, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Caribbean and Canadian region. Propelled by a local tragedy, in which an oil rig sinks in a violent storm off the coast of Newfoundland, February follows the life of Helen O’Mara, widowed by the accident, as she continuously spirals from the present day back to that devastating and transformative winter.

After overcoming the hardships of raising four children as a single parent, Helen’s strength and calculated positivity fool everyone into believing that she’s pushed through the paralyzing grief of losing her spouse. But in private, Helen has obsessively maintained a powerful connection to her deceased husband. When Helen’s son unexpectedly returns home with life-changing news, her secret world is irrevocably shaken, and Helen is quickly forced to come to terms with her inability to lay the past to rest.

An unforgettable glimpse into the complex love and cauterizing grief that run through all of our lives, February tenderly investigates how memory knits together the past and present, and pinpoints the very human need to always imagine a future, no matter how fragile.

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Moore is the acclaimed author of two Scotiabank Giller Prize-finalists, Open, a story collection, and the novel Alligator, which also won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Caribbean and Canadian region. Moore lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Reviews

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.)
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In February 1982, the Ocean Ranger, the world’s largest submersible oil drilling rig, capsized in a fierce storm off the coast of Newfoundland. Eighty-four men perished. In Moore’s accomplished novel about the risks of love, Helen O’Mara is left behind with three small children and another on the way when Cal, her husband of 10 years, dies. The narrative shifts back and forth through time, tossing up scenes from the present as well as from Helen and Cal’s marriage, the day of the disaster, and the years of Helen raising her family alone. In the present, much of the focus is on son John, an engineer whose job (ironically, analyzing risk on oil rigs) takes him all over the world. Now he is on his way home and trying to come to terms with the fact that a woman he barely knows is carrying his child. The novel’s episodic nature somewhat diminishes its emotional impact, especially toward the end. But Moore, whose previous novel, Alligator (2006), won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, renders sensations with the precision of a Vermeer. --Mary Ellen Quinn

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802170706
• ISBN 13: 9780802170705
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320