The History of Great Things
A Novel
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3.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A witty and irresistible story of a mother and daughter regarding each other through the looking glass of time, grief, and forgiveness.
In two beautifully counterpoised narratives, two women—mother and daughter—try to make sense of their own lives by revisiting what they know about each other. The History of Great Things tells the entwined stories of Lois, a daughter of the Depression Midwest who came to New York to transform herself into an opera star, and her daughter, Elizabeth, an aspiring writer who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s in the forbidding shadow of her often-absent, always larger-than-life mother. In a tour de force of storytelling and human empathy, Elizabeth chronicles the events of her mother’s life, and in turn Lois recounts her daughter’s story—pulling back the curtain on lifelong secrets, challenging and interrupting each other, defending their own behavior, brandishing or swallowing their pride, and, ultimately, coming to understand each other in a way that feels both extraordinary and universal.
The History of Great Things is a novel about a mother and daughter who are intimately connected and not connected enough; it will make readers laugh and cry and wonder how we become the adults we always knew we should—even if we’re not always adults our parents understand.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A mother and daughter narrate each other's life stories in Crane's ambitious, quasi-autobiographical novel. When Lois Crane leaves her husband to pursue a career as an opera singer, dragging her young daughter, Betsy, to New York City, it's the beginning of a mother-daughter relationship that only becomes more strained and complicated over the years. In an attempt to bond as adults, Lois and Betsy sit down together, each one telling the other's life story from birth to the present, embellishing and editorializing where necessary. Betsy describes Lois as a young child, then as a young woman going through college and motherhood, moving to New York, falling in love for the second time, and finding some nominal success as a singer. In Lois's account, Betsy stumbles through some fairly rote rites of passage, then falls into aimlessness and alcoholism as an adult, before sobering up and finding her calling as a writer. Peppered with touching moments in which the women find unexpected common ground, as well as hilariously snarky asides between Betsy and Lois at the end of each chapter, the mother-daughter dynamic feels genuine. However, the gimmick of an author named Elizabeth Crane writing about a character named Elizabeth ("Betsy") Crane strains the book, and the narrative voices are so similar it's often hard to tell where Lois cuts off and Betsy picks up. The confusing finish, in which Betsy and Lois craft several endings of varying degrees of happiness, fails to deliver on the intriguing premise.
