Instructor
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
***THE MIRAMICHI READER'S VERY BEST BOOK AWARDS, FICTION: LONGLIST***
***FOREWORD INDIES: LITERARY, ADULT FICTION: BRONZE***
When Ydessa Bloom’s husband dies in a Cessna crash in a mid-Ontario lake, she rents a cottage at that lake, without really comprehending why, and stays for three months. There she meets three people who will influence her life dramatically—her landlady, a yoga teacher, and a precocious eight-year-old boy named Henry Rattle.
Years later, at the age of twenty-five and reeling from personal tragedy, Henry seeks Ydessa out once again, and they find themselves alone on the day of the Northeast blackout, drawn into an encounter that will change them both.
In Instructor, Beth Follett magnificently follows the natural tendencies of the human mind to dart and drift, to leap and eddy, creating an utterly compelling narrative at once patient and enthralling. Through grief, wonder, and introspection, Instructor captures the fluidity of the self, carrying readers away in the current of Follett’s inescapable prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Follet (Tell It Slant) underwhelms with this diffuse meditation on grief, loss, and renewal. In 1988, Toronto woman Ydessa Bloom picks up the pieces of her shattered life after her husband, Roger, a pilot, dies in a plane crash. In her bereavement, she rents a cottage on remote Baptiste Lake, where Roger's plane went down, and befriends a precocious nine-year-old boy, Henry, whose mother died the year before. The first act of the novel is a thoughtful, curious look into the insularity of grief. However, once Ydessa leaves the lake for New York City, where she has heartbreaking encounters with survivors of the AIDS epidemic, then devotes herself to a guru at a Vermont ashram, the narrative wobbles under the weight of a surfeit of underdeveloped characters and gratuitous amounts of internal dialogue. In 2003, Ydessa meets Henry again as an adult, and while this thread has the potential for intrigue, Follett's sparse lyrical style grows exhausting, and the occasional switches in perspecive and into second-person narration become distracting. By the end, neither the characters nor the plot feel entirely coherent. It's a disappointing tangle.
