February

November 2, 2009
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.

December 1, 2009
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 fa‡ade 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 lyrical earnestness.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 15, 2010
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

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2010
In February 1982, the Ocean Ranger, the worlds largest submersible oil drilling rig, capsized in a fierce storm off the coast of Newfoundland. Eighty-four men perished. In Moores accomplished novel about the risks of love, Helen OMara 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 Cals 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 novels 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)