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Recent Reviews
Away from Her (2007)
This hauntingly beautiful and heartbreakingly real story of Alzheimers and its impact on both patients and caregivers is based on a story by Alice Munro, The Bear Came over the Mountain. Fiona (hristie)develops the dread disease and her husband, Grant (Pinsent), agrees that she should go to Meadowlake, where she develops an infatuation with another patient, Aubrey, (apparently a not uncommon occurrence). Grant is then “away from her,” as much as she is away from him How he and Marian (Dukakis), Aubrey’s wife, respond to this is complex, human, and quite profound, a kind of allegory of what it means to discover that things never work out as one expects. Brilliant performances by all four principals including Murphy as the much diminished and weepy Aubrey. ...Read the full review
Seven Loves
A beautifully written first novel in which a seventy something woman remembers seven loves, each from a different stage of her life and all recalled in a non linear narrative that skips from youth to age and back again several times, suggesting as do so many of our “second half stories” that from the perspective of age all these ages may be equally important and equally real to the rememberer. The book concludes with a most insightful essay on this subject by the author entitled The Ages. ...Read the full review
Michael Tolliver Lives
Tolliver, the gay hero of Maupin’s Tales of the City series is back. He hasn’t died of AIDs and is beginning to confront his fifties and the effects of aging. As funny and human as his other books and even more moving in its portrayal of our weaknesses and strengths. ...Read the full review
The Madonnas of Leningrad
An exquisitely imagined inner portrait of an aging American woman whose early Alzheimer’s brings back in vivid detail the years she spent appreciating the beauty and struggling to preserve the treasures of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum from the Nazis, a time when she was also starving and terrorized by the city’s blockade. Because all this has become more real to her than her present “reality,” should she be considered deprived or blessed? After you have finished this beautiful first novel, you may be surprised by your answer. ...Read the full review