Under The House
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“Intense and compassionate, Pinder's story skirts sensationalism by focusing on character. It is a powerful tale.”
—Publishers Weekly (New York)
“A haunting first novel by a writer of great talent and sensitivity. It treats a difficult theme with humanity and admirable complexity.”
—Margaret Atwood
UNDER THE HOUSE is the story of the Rathbones, a prominent Saskatchewan family who live with a secret they're determined to keep. Only young Evelyn finds the courage to break down the wall of silence that keeps the truth at bay. Her ally is Aunt Maude, a timid woman who has lived with the secret from childhood. The secret made her different, the butt of playground jokes. The secret was like the apples in the cellar under the house-rotting, sticky and soft. It is timing that gives this novel its strength, from the confused wanderings of Aunt Maude at the start to the unanswered letter from her sister which ends it. Along the way, Leslie Hall Pinder gives herself every opportunity, right down to a courtroom scene, for sensation and melodrama, and skillfully resists each one in favor of her long-term aim: the creation of a family so determined not to look back at their past that they never see the chains that bind them to it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This accomplished first novel by a Canadian lawyer was well received in the author's home country and England. Her tale of a respected Saskatchewan family centers on a dark secret, tantalizingly withheld until the last pages, that distorts the lives of one generation and threatens those in the next. S. D. Rathbone was an old-fashioned patriarch, inspiring overweening pride in his son Stanley. Another son, Clarence, is less assertive. An older daughter, Isabel, flees to Vancouver as a teenager, while Maude, the youngest and meekest, stays at home until she marries. Stanley weds a woman whose spirited illegitimate daughter revives old anxieties in the family. When S. D. dies, the girl runs away with Maude and precipitates a court case in which Stanley, motivated by greed, declares his belief that Maude is the daughter of Clarence and Isabel. Yet the subject of this sometimes rambling narrative is less the question of Maude's parentage than an examination of the effects on family members of years of ignorance, guilt and festering accusation. Intense and compassionate, Pinder's story skirts sensationalism by focusing on character. It is a powerful tale.
