Mary Swan

This historical novel focuses, initially, on a family in England who suffer tragedy and move to Canada in the second half of the 19th century. They end up in a smallish town where the husband works as a bookkeeper. Tragedy strikes again. After that, the book is about the repercussions of that tragedy and how it affects several people in the town. This is a really bad description, but I don't want to give anything away.

I really loved Swan's writing, which is elegant and almost poetic at times. This could have been a 4.5-star or more read for me, but I wanted a little more insight, a little more detail, and a little more closure. Some things were left just a bit too ambiguous for my liking. Still, it was a good read.

4 stars… (altro)

My Ghosts follows several generations of the McFarlane family over a period of approximately 150 years. The book is divided into different sections with several different narrators often, as is the way with families, with the same names. The book begins in 1879 with Clare, one of six siblings and ends in the present with another Clare. The original Clare is a 16-year-old orphan living with her six brothers and sisters in a poor area of Toronto and, from her, we learn the themes of the tale. Clare spends a great deal of her time thinking about, well, time:

“Thinking about what it is and why it is. Thinking about how it can be Eternal, and yet gone forever."

Time and memory and the interconnectedness of families are the major themes of this novel. But time here is not always linear. Each section moves the story forward but within the sections, it is much more fluid as each narrator shares their memories as they ponder their lives and their pasts. And, in the way of memory, the sections are divided into short vignettes, sometimes following some set order but often seemingly random:

"how strange it was, how you could go years without thinking about a thing, but then it popped up"

And as important as memory is, so are the gaps in memory. Although, we may not remember the previous generations, they trail us like ghosts, sometimes in a single memory or in a name, sometimes in a familial trait, and sometimes in the repeated family legends and, as time and memory change, so do the stories and their outcomes.

The last section belongs to the second Clare. She is older, retired, and recently widowed. She has sold her home but, when her new house is not ready for occupancy, she takes the time to follow an earlier path and reclaim earlier memories. Like the first Clare, she thinks a great deal about time:

“They’ve always happened, she realizes, these moments when she seems to wake up and wonder where she’s been, sometimes for years. I’m a ghost haunting my own life, she thinks, and then says, ‘What on Earth does that mean?’”

My Ghosts is both beautiful and haunting in its portrayal of one family over generations and about how time and memory define us. It is also, in some ways, frustrating in that we only learn small fragments of these characters, many of whom we wish to know better but, then, isn't that the way of families as time and memory shift and bend and our ghosts slowly fade but never fully disappear from our collective memories, their legacy remaining if only in the shape of an ear.… (altro)