February
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In the wake of an oil-rig disaster, a widow tries to rebuild her life in this novel by "an astonishing writer" (Richard Ford).
Inspired by the tragic sinking of the Ocean Ranger during a violent storm off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982, February follows the life of Helen O'Mara, widowed by the accident, as she spirals back and forth between the present day and that devastating and transformative winter.
As she raises four children on her own, 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 examination of complex love and cauterizing grief, February investigates how memory knits together the past and present, and pinpoints the very human need to always imagine a future, no matter how fragile.
"Lisa Moore's work is passionate, gritty, lucid and beautiful. She has a great gift." —Anne Enright
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
