Celebrating 154 Years of Tradition: Peace College

The famed fountain

I interrupt this regularly scheduled book blog to call attention to an issue that is weighing heavily on my heart.  I am a proud alumna of Peace College in Raleigh, NC and was shocked and outraged to discover that my beloved institution, whose mission for 154 years has been to offer women the highest quality educational and professional opportunities, has announced that it will become a co-ed "university."

Main Building (the tiny figure in
the wedding dress is me!)

Peace College was founded in 1857 when William Peace, a member of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Raleigh, donated $10,000 dollars and a parcel of land to establish an institution dedicated to women's education.  Like most colleges, Peace has not been immune to change throughout the years.  Used briefly as a hospital during the Civil War, what began as a junior college started offering bachelor degrees in 1995.  Throughout its entire history, Peace has been a leader in offering women educational and professional opportunities that traditional co-ed universities did not provide.  Peace focused on individualized education, cultivated professional relationships with businesses in all sectors of Raleigh through internships, and enhanced the cultural awareness of her students through study abroad programs.  The recent changes to the college, from its name to its educational mission, arrive on the heels of changes that have already rocked the foundation of Peace such as removing prominent faculty members and eliminating established majors and programs.

I entered Peace College, a wide-eyed and naive freshman straight from a tiny, podunk high school, in the fall of 2005.  Since my high-school graduating class was made up of twenty-eight students, thirteen of whom I had known from kindergarten, Peace seemed like a vast resource of knowledge, professors, and fellow students that I couldn't wait to tap, and I was not disappointed by what I found there.  Although over time its vastness was diminished in  my eyes, this freshman preconception was replaced with a more important and lasting fact - Peace was a community, a sisterhood where students and professors encouraged each other's growth as leaders.  I was challenged from my very first to my very last moment on campus to think critically and assert myself and my ideas confidently.

Proudly displaying my diploma

I graduated from Peace in 2008 and entered North Carolina State University as a graduate student in their English Literature program.  If I ever doubted that Peace was the right place for me as an undergraduate, those doubts were dispelled the moment I set foot on N. C. State's campus.  The classes were challenging and engaging, but it lacked the feeling of camaraderie and communal learning that I so treasured at Peace.  I was fortunate enough to be offered a teaching assistantship while I was at N. C. State, but opportunities like this are few and far between.  At Peace, I was involved in every sector of the college campus.  I was co-editor of the Prism, Peace's literary magazine; I pioneered one of the first teaching internships in the English department; I helped lead several chapel services under Rev. Tara Woodard-Lehman; I toured Europe with the Peace College Chamber Singers; I spent hours reminiscing with alumnae and soliciting donations for the Loyalty Fund; I attended basketball games to support one of my suitemates who was a member of the team; I presented a paper at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Salisbury, Maryland, which was published in the conference proceedings.  If I had not had the support and encouragement of my Peace professors, especially those in the English and Music departments, I never would have had the confidence to pursue these endeavors, and what's more, I succeeded at them.  N. C. State is a fine institution of higher education, but the same educational and professional opportunities were not extended to me, and although I successfully completed a teaching assistantship, which directly prepared me for my current profession as a full-time instructor of English at Nash Community College, and presented papers at two conferences while a student at State, I had to go after these opportunities on my own.  If it had not been for my education at Peace, which fostered self-confidence and intrinsic motivation, I would not have had the aplomb to chase these opportunities unprompted.

It's customary for graduates to toss roses into the fountain.

The Women's College Coalition has published much research on the benefits of attending an all women's college on their website, www.womenscolleges.org.  The benefits they highlight can be summed up by my experiences listed above.  The opportunities for women at a women's college are numerous, and they are encouraged to seek and explore them all.  Perhaps most importantly though, women's colleges encourage their students to embark on a journey of self-discovery.  Historically, women have been discriminated against and told to be ashamed of their intelligence, creativity, and successes.  Taking a college that has traditionally celebrated the achievements of women and opening it to men does not foster equality but encroaches upon the space that we women have carved out for ourselves where we are free to explore educational, cultural, and professional opportunities uninhibited.  Peace College is losing the essence of itself, and now has little to distinguish it from its nearby university competitors.

My best friend wore my robe!

As many of my fellow alumnae have already indicated, we are more so upset about the lack of communication and the secrecy that surrounded this change.  The strength of a liberal arts education is that it teaches people how to communicate effectively with others and be aware of their audience.  The President and the Board of Trustees deliberately flaunted this educational foundation by avoiding an open and honest discussion with the people the change would affect the most: Peace alumnae, current students, and faculty.  This has now become a battle of words, and the name change from Peace College to William Peace University further disassociates alumnae, current students, and faculty from the college they have served, attended, and loved. None of us are so naive as to think that change is avoidable, and as President Townsley pointed out in her webinar on Wednesday, July 27, Peace College has been through several changes already in her 154 year history.  She began as Peace Institute, a school that educated girls beginning in kindergarten, morphed into a high school and then a junior college, before finally becoming the four-year baccalaureate institute it is known as today.  However, during this time, it never wavered from its mission to "challenge women to an adventure of intellectual and personal discovery, preparing them for graduate and lifelong learning, for meaningful careers, and for ethical lives of purpose, leadership and service."  To become a co-educational university would mean desecrating the original legacy and mission of the college, of which women were the focus and recipients.  These changes, to paraphrase another alumna, are not merely an adaption to the current economic climate, but a reinvention of 154 year legacy and tradition, and in only a year's time!  As the daughter and granddaughter of teachers and a teacher myself, I can say with certainty that viable, quality curriculum change on this scale in the space of one year is virtually impossible.  A more appropriate timetable might have garnered the support of more alumnae. 

Photo in the fountain

However saddened I am by the changes, and believe me, I am deeply distraught, I do think that this tragedy has proven Peace College's success in creating strong, outspoken women who band together to fight, organize, and stand up for what they believe in.  And that is a legacy I am proud to carry on. 

Review: Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares

Sisterhood Everlasting by Ann Brashares is the fifth installment in Brashares' smash young adult series, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.  Set several years after the fourth book, Forever in Blue, when the girls are all nearing their thirtieth birthdays, Sisterhood Everlasting is a poignant look at the dynamics of a friendship through the years.

I picked up Sisterhood Everlasting because I had read the four Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books as a teen/college student.  I grew up with Tibby, Lena, Carmen, and Bridget.  Their trials and triumphs were my trials and triumphs, and the strength of their friendship reminded me of my relationship with my best friend, Bonnie.  I had been disappointed with the melodramatic focus on Tibby's unplanned pregnancy in Forever in Blue, and Brashares in-between novel, The Last Summer of (You and Me), fell flat for me as well.  However, I was invested in the lives of the sisterhood, so I read Sisterhood Everlasting, despite several reviews that it was disheartening.  I had to know where Tibby, Lena, Carmen, and Bridget end up.

And I was not disappointed.  Sisterhood Everlasting will definitely tug at your heartstrings, but in my opinion, the book ends in a place of hope.  What more can you ask for then to have hope for the future?  Brashares took her characters in directions that I didn't always agree with or understand, but they all ended up in the right place - and what's more, they ended up there together.  Brashares throws a couple of plot twists at the reader that seem confusing and just downright disconcerting at first, but she proves in Sisterhood Everlasting that she is a master of interconnection and the surprise plot reveal.  I don't want to give away any specifics for those of you who haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but if you are reading and get discouraged, keep reading - I promise you won't be disappointed even if you are saddened along the way.  

Sisterhood Everlasting is a book that stuck with me.  I lived inside of the characters' lives while I was reading it.  My own life and experiences fell away, and I was consumed by the fears, sorrows, and ultimately the joys of Tibby, Bridget, Lena, and Carmen.  In addition, it's a book that teaches the reader something about herself.  I am sure that all readers of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series has identified with one woman in the foursome more than the others.  For me, that one has always been Lena.  I am the oldest of sisters, practical, and responsible, sometimes to the detriment of having a good time, and I have been in love with my high-school sweetheart for seven and a half years (we were married last November).  Through Lena's story, I was forced to confront some of the faults in my own persona - especially my habit of internalizing negative emotions.  Therefore, I find Sisterhood Everlasting to be a book that will speak to all readers because of its diverse characterizations and timeless, endearing plot lines.

Best matched with a history with "The Pants," your best friend(s), a glass of wine, and a box of tissues.

Lifting Books is Heavy: Musings on Moving to Goodreads

When I first joined Facebook, my favorite application was the Visual Bookshelf through Living Social.  I loved having an easily searchable place to list the books I had read, was reading, and wanted to read.  Whenever I received a gift card to a bookstore, I would visit my "Visual Bookshelf" and eagerly write down titles of books I couldn't wait to purchase off my "Want to Read" list.  The Visual Bookshelf application was prone to outages, and I unlinked it from my Facebook account to maintain privately some months ago, but I still relied on the site to keep my "want-to-reads" and "reads" in order.

Living Social recently announced on their Visual Bookshelf website that they would be closing their site.  The creators suggested that I import my collection (over 900 books!) into Goodreads.  I did because I didn't want to lose my painstakingly created collection of obscure reading material.  My new Goodreads bookshelf is groaning under the weight of its new additions, but I admit I am overwhelmed by all of the options on Goodreads as well as its social connections.  I used Living Social's Visual Bookshelf for purely personal reasons, so I am unsure how to navigate Goodreads' friends' and apps' features.  And honestly...I am not sure if I want to.

I maintain a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, and this blog in addition to my personal and work e-mail.  Do I really need to plug into another online environment?  Can't people who want to know what I am reading follow this blog?  Do I really want to upload book reviews twice to two different sites?  And yet...I could use Goodreads to send traffic to this blog and tap into an audience that I do not reach outside of Facebook.  Here, then, is the crux of the social networking phenomenon.  When your entire life is on display for the online populace, does anything remain personal? 

Friends, I think I'll keep my Goodreads library just for me.

Review: How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson

Tanya Egan Gibson's novel How to Buy a Love of Reading has been likened to Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girl series because it focuses on the spoiled rich teens of Fox Glen and their dysfunctional families.  I am not ashamed to admit that I read, and liked, the Gossip Girl series for their shallowness.  As a student of literature, I have read a lot of heavy stuff, and sometimes I like to balance that out with fluff.  Gossip Girl makes no attempt to disguise its shallowness - and for that I can respect Cecily von Ziegesar.  I wish I could say the same about Gibson and her novel.

Despite having similar plots, Gibson's book is a smart book; however, it is a book that calls attention to its intelligence, which frankly, I find arrogant and annoying.  Each part of the novel is titled after a literary device like theme, setting, and backstory.  Each chapter then goes on to demonstrate or unveil the theme, setting, or backstory of the characters and story in How to Buy a Love of Reading.  Gibson is very deliberately calling attention to the storytelling devices in her novel in an effort to prove that she is much smarter than the characters she has created and that her novel is so much more than a shallow story about the frivolous life of the rich.

As if the author's overt intrusion into her own story were not unsettling enough, the novel's plot centers around an author, Bree, who has been commissioned to write a novel for an (almost) sixteen year old girl, Carley, in an attempt by Carley's parents to "brand" her with a hobby.  It is obvious that Bree - whose specialty is "meta-fiction," stories within stories within stories that require copious footnotes and explanations and tangents (kind of like a novel full of sentences like these) - is supposed to be an incarnation of our author - Gibson.  The novel she writes for Carley as well as all their discussions about literature and writing are mirrored in Gibson's execution of her novel.  For example, the section in which Bree describes meta-fiction (see explanation above) to Carley is written as meta-fiction.

Gibson's characters are on a whole unlikable as well.  They are stereotypically branded based on their problems, and it is only in the few pages of the epilogue that any of these problems approach resolve.  Bree is a struggling novelist - for obvious reasons - who is so worried about being perceived as a writer of fluff that she works extra hard to be cynical and intelligently snarky that it is painful to watch and read.  Carley is your typical fifteen year old girl with an overbearing mother - an outsider wanting desperately to fit in and thus has multiple issues with self-esteem and body image.  Her mother is your average cold bitch, who wants to mold her daughter into a beauty queen at all costs and her father, while more likeable, is predictably having an affair with her mother's best friend because his wife is too frigid to give it up.  The other main character is Carley's best friend and love interest, Hunter, who is the epitome of the popular, but troubled, kid.  Carley is the only one Hunter trusts to see him at his worst - and as the novel progresses, he is more often worse than better.

I thought about putting this novel down several pages in, but I have to admit, it gets better the further you read.  In addition to the novel commission, the action of How to Buy a Love of Reading mostly hinges on various parties and after-parties, but there are some poignant moments when Gibson allows her characters simply to be.  The section on "Backstory" is refreshingly free of heavy-handed symbolism and plot devices, even if this is the section where the reader learns Carley's and Hunter's backstories.  Also, although the actual writing needs work, Bree's commissioned novel has an interesting plot that mocks pop culture phenomenons like reality T.V.  The novel loses some of its pretentious observation several sections in, and Carley's story ends up in a hopeful place, but unfortunately, Gibson's epilogue reverts back to some of the same pseudo-philisophical phrasings that the beginning of her novel suffers from.

In short this novel is not for the faint of heart.  The reader has to be determined to see Gibson's characters through, and just maybe he or she will be rewarded with a few small scenes of touching revelation and reality. 

Best matched with an ability to persevere.

Review: Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

Southern women are concerned about appearances.  We desire to project perfection especially in our relationships, which are often imperfect, leading us to drink copiously, gossip, and finally enter therapy.  There is nothing worse to a Southern woman than the shame of others discovering the cracks in her façade.  Despite the image touted by the popular movie Steel Magnolias, Southern women are not impenetrable.  They are just better at hiding their gaffes than other women. 

Southern women also love their men - despite their flaws.  In fact, the more flaws they have, the more we think we can fix them.

Katie Crouch understands Southern women.  Her novel, Girls in Trucks, is not a feel-good Southern romance but a hard look at the ties that bind Southern women to their hometowns.  The novel tells the story of Sarah Walters as she attempts to reconcile her Southern roots with her Northern, New York City adult life.  Sarah is a lifelong member of the Camellias, Charleston, South Carolina's elite group of Southern debutantes.  The Camillas are not a group you can join - you are born into it - and its members are your friends for the rest of your life - even though you may not like them half the time.  In spite of their differences, the friends that continually reappear in Sarah's life are her fellow Camellias, Charlotte, Annie, and Bitsy.  Girls in Trucks is as much their story as it is hers.  

The novel follows Sarah through a rough timeline from age nine and Cotillion School to age thirty-five and the desperate desire to find "the one."  The perspective in the novel occasionally shifts, reflecting Sarah's comfort level with the situation.  Like most teens, she is fully immersed in "I," but as she grows older and is faced with situations such as the death of a close friend, she distances herself from the experience by using third person.  Surprisingly, this shift is not irritating; it feels honest.  Like a good Southern woman, Sarah attempts to compartmentalize rather than deal with the truths raised by abuse, infidelity, death, suicide, and pregnancy.  Readers looking for a "happy" ending should not expect to find it here; however, like most good novels, the conclusion emphasizes living in the present moment and finding hope in the future.

Best matched with a glass of sweet iced tea...or a gin and tonic.

Recommendation: Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling

With the upcoming release of the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II quickly approaching, I thought I would take the time to recommend the series for those who have never read the novels.  To say I love J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is an understatement.  I grew up with Harry, Hermione, and Ron and impatiently waited for each new installment in the series to arrive over its decade of publication (1997-2007).  I have read each book several times and always learn something new about a character, a scene, or life in general.  Professor Dumbledore offers some especially wise words throughout the series.  I have studied the books for school, written conference papers, and taught them in my own English 111 courses.  I am currently collecting research for my own book on the series.  Their versatility is astounding.  (*Note: This recommendation includes spoilers.)

In case you have been living under a rock, the Harry Potter series by author J. K. Rowling is a set of seven books about a young wizard named Harry Potter.  The readers are first introduced to Harry at age eleven as he attempts to survive yet another summer with his awful Aunt and Uncle Dursley.  It is during this summer that Harry discovers the truth about his parents and himself: they are wizards.  This summer marks a turning point in Harry’s life as he learns of the existence of magic and of the wizarding school he will now attend, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.  However, Harry’s parents are not able to share in his joy as they were killed by an evil, dark wizard named Voldemort when Harry was a baby.  In fact, Harry is revered by the wizarding community he is just entering for the first time because Voldemort tried to kill Harry too, but Harry lived.  He, therefore, is the only wizard known to survive “The Killing Curse.”  

Store front at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter
Taken on my Christmas 2010 trip

Each of the seven novels chronicles a year in Harry’s life, starting in the summer and following him through a new year at Hogwarts.  Harry makes many new friends, especially Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and a fair share of enemies such as Draco Malfoy, son of one of Voldemort’s most devoted followers.  Once he learned he was a wizard, Harry’s life changed from one of dull drudgery to exciting, and sometimes deadly, adventure.  In each novel, Harry comes face to face with some lethal form of Voldemort or his followers and must fight for his life.  With each encounter, the fate of the wizarding world becomes harder to foretell, and it is hard to distinguish between friends and enemies.  Finally, in the seventh, and final installment of the series, Harry and Voldemort dual in an epic battle of good versus evil.  Harry’s near death experience and willingness to sacrifice himself for the friends and family that he loves results in Voldemort’s defeat.  Along the way, many friends and family are lost including Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts and Harry’s mentor, and Sirius Black, Harry’s godfather and his father’s best friend, but these losses continue to empower Harry and give him the drive and the confidence to prove that love and friendship will always triumph in the end.

Hogwarts at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter
Taken on my Christmas 2010 trip

As with much excellent literature - especially that deemed "Young Adult," there have been cries to censor Harry for reasons ranging from anti-family to Satanism, but I emphatically assure readers of this blog that these accusations are preposterous.  The Harry Potter series is so much more than a story about magic and a wizard.  Following the tradition of Homer, it is an epic tale of a boy's search for home - and who hasn't spent days, months, even years wondering where he or she belongs?  It is a story about sacrifice and the never-ending struggle between good and evil.  As the characters grow older, they realize that it is not always easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad.  It is a story about family.  Harry learns that even though his parents are dead, their memory lives in him, giving him strength in times of need and that ultimately, you can build your own family by surrounding yourself with those you love.  And, above all, it is a story about the power of love - Rowling's novels most of all prove that love is the magic that binds humanity together and gives even the most lowly of us the confidence to believe in ourselves and our actions and the actions of those around us and triumph over adversity.

I encourage you readers to look closely - this fantasy world has the ability to teach us more about the real world we live in than you may think.

Best matched with a sense of adventure and compassion for those with a desire to live.

Review: Labor Day by Joyce Maynard

I'll be honest; it was the cover of Joyce Maynard's Labor Day that caught my attention.  Who hasn't drawn a heart with someone's initials or merely doodled on a fogged up pane of glass?  I have had this book on my Kindle for a while, so when I opened it up, I couldn't even remember what the blurb said it was about.  I only remembered the striking cover.

As predicted by the cover, Maynard's novel confronts love in all its forms - husband and wife, mother and child, adult lovers, and novice relationships.  Like a foggy imprint on glass, these relationships are opaque - not without their doubts - and cannot always be clearly discerned, but pay close attention, breathe on it again, and the imprint is still visible.  

The novel is told from the perspective of thirteen year old Henry, son of divorced parents.  He chose to stay with his eccentric mother rather than move in with his father's new ready-made family: stepmother, older brother, and baby sister.  His mother, Adele, used to be a dancer, but a series of miscarriages after Henry was born culminating in his parents divorce have turned her into an introvert.  Rarely does she even leave the house for groceries.  Instead, she and Henry subsist on frozen fish dinners and canned soups.  It is on a rare outing during Labor Day weekend to stock up on school supplies for Henry that he and his mother meet Frank, an escaped convict from a nearby prison.  Henry and Adele, unused to a kind male presence in their lives, agree to shelter him from the police until he can leave town unnoticed.  It is over this weekend that Adele and Frank fall in love.  Henry, who until now has never had to compete for his mother's attention, is torn between loving and hating Frank himself.  Frank teaches him to bake pie and play catch.  He tells stories about growing up on his grandparents' farm and the accidental murder that locked him away going on eighteen years.  Frank represents for Henry the father/friend he never had, and although he enjoys these few days of life as a "normal" family, mother, father, and child eating home-cooked meals, happy, he can't shake his uneasiness at the changes love has wrought in his mother. 

Although the plot seems outlandish when it's spelled out like this, Maynard's writing style is so matter-of-fact, it wasn't until I was midway through the novel that I realized how odd this situation is.  By then I was invested, and I had to keep reading.   The book has a surprisingly conventional ending, but one that after the insanity of the beginning I was glad to encounter.  The conclusion proves that the imprint of those we love lingers on even after those people are no longer physically present in our lives.  Maynard deals frankly with the ways love, sex, and loss change us, our relationships with others, and the way we relate to the world.  Despite the unbelievable plot line, this novel is worth reading simply for the complicated lessons on life that Henry tackles with his honest, preteen perspective.

Best matched with a belief that love exists in the most unlikely of places.

Review: April & Oliver by Tess Callahan

April & Oliver by Tess Callahan is the type of book that leaves you gasping for air.  The pain this family experiences is raw and undiluted.  Although Callahan's writing is not explicit, it is a little too easy to imagine what goes on in April's relationships.  However, the undercurrent of love between April, Oliver, and their grandmother, Nana, eases the pain of their shared experiences.

April & Oliver chronicles a year in the life of best friends and step-cousins April and Oliver, but its pages span more than this year in their life.  Past memories from their early childhood and teens appear unbidden as they navigate this treacherous year filled with death, abuse, love, sex, and (almost) marriage.  There is a reason Callahan chose to title her novel after her main characters - as children, you rarely saw one without the other, and even as adults April's and Oliver's thoughts are often turned towards one another.  It is this inextricable link, this entangled bond between the two that at once saves their lives and dooms their other relationships.

A victim of sexual abuse at age fourteen by her father's forty-year old friend and fellow bartender Quincy and physical abuse at the hands of her father, April, now in her late twenties, continues to live out this cycle of abuse in her current relationships.  The men she dates, all older, all abusive, are merely reincarnations of her dysfunctional relationship with Quincy and her father.  (Maybe Freud was onto something....) Even her job bartending refuses to let her relinquish her past and move on.  Although she doesn't give the appearance of wallowing, April refuses to seek better for herself - a choice that continually exasperates her grandmother, Nana, who is on the verge of senility, and her step-cousins Oliver and Al.  The only loving relationship April has ever had is with her brother, Buddy, who passes away at the age of 18 in a car wreck at the beginning of the novel.  This tragic and untimely event forces April to come face to face with cracks in her life that are threatening to splinter and pierce all those in their radius - Oliver and family included.

Oliver has not been home or even spoken to April in five years - Buddy's funeral brings him home, and his physical return heralds a return of all of the memories and feelings he had bottled and stored over the past five years.  Unlike April, Oliver has become a successful law student with a beautiful home and an even more beautiful and kind-hearted fiance, Bernadette.  But in the face of all this practical, responsible success, Oliver cannot let go of his irrational feelings for April.  Oliver is the only one who knows about the abuse April suffered and the only one who will acknowledge the abuse she continues to suffer at the hands of her many boyfriends.  Partly out of a compulsion to protect her and partly because he loves her, Oliver continues to seek April out when she is at her lowest and bring her into the fold of the family.  This does not sit well with Oliver's fiance, who despite her altruistic nature, fears the deep feelings between April and Oliver.

The attraction between April and Oliver is undeniable, and you can't help but like Oliver - he has a tortured artist's soul in a responsible man's body.  He is sweet, protective, and attentive.  April is rougher around the edges, and although she cannot help the abuse she has been through, her continual need to perpetuate her suffering is a bit masochist.  In short, she and Oliver are perfect for each other, and I spent the entire novel wanting them to kiss and make up; however, at the same time, I liked Bernadette, Oliver's fiance.  Callahan crafts her character very deliberately to be likeable.  It would be so much easier to hate her and root for April and Oliver, but in real life, who we like and who we end up with aren't always the same people.  Feelings aren't always clear cut, and while I think Callahan errs on the side of tragedy, she does reflect real life.

Another stumbling block in the novel for me though is the familial ties binding April and Oliver together.  Their fathers were stepbrothers, making April and Oliver stepcousins.  Even though there was no blood involved, the fact that they liked each other and called the same woman "Nana" felt a little incestuous to me.  This element of the novel is present, but Callahan does not spend an inordinate amount of time focused on it.  As a plot device, it actually works fairly well for placing April and Oliver in the same place at the same time and worrying over the same people.

Outside of April and Oliver's will-they or won't-they relationship, I loved the character of Nana.  She embodies some very real fears about growing old, dealing with your past life and loves, and responding to children and grandchildren.  She has a no-nonsense attitude towards life and her grandchildren's choices, tempered by an endearing quality to forget where she is and what she is wearing.  Although parts of the book, like April's decision to forgo telling Nana about Buddy's death, disturbed me, on a whole, I found the novel to be tragic, yet hopeful.  Callahan's decision to leave the conclusion of the book open-ended is appropriate and gracefully executed.  The romantic in me imagines that all is reconciled, and every character ends up where he or she needs to be, even if the road to get there was rocky - but of course, this is just one reader's opinion.  Other readers will have to come to their own conclusions about these characters' destinies.

Best matched with: an unrequited love.