After several years of wandering around Europe, Australian-born Scully, his wife, Jennifer, and their seven-year-old daughter, Billie, decide to settle down in a ramshackle old house in rural Ireland. Jennifer and Billie return to Australia to settle their affairs, while Scully stays behind to make the house habitable. Several months later, Scully is to meet them at Shannon Airport, but only Billie emerges from the plane. Scully sets off on an obsessive chase through their old haunts in Europe in a desperate search for Jennifer, dragging his daughter with him. What follows is very strange: it's a ghost story, but the ghosts make only two brief appearances; it's a love story in which we never meet one of the lovers; it's a picuresque journey where the sights are never described.

For the first 50 pages I was sure this would become one of my favorite books of the year. I was captivated by Winton's brilliant prose and his intriguing premise: Scully's wife Jennifer flies from Australia to join him in Ireland but doesn't get off the plane. Their daughter Billie does, but won't tell what happened to her mother. I felt nicely set up for a fine tale of suspense, as Scully sets off to find Jennifer. There was some suspense but when I finished the book I was frustrated and enraged. Furthermore, why couldn't we learn what happened to Jennifer? The only clue is Billie's impression on the plane that her mother's face was turning to marble. Not very helpful. One must conclude that Winton doesn't want us to understand, he wants us to accept the mystery without the resolution. That seems to be the message of the horsemen who gathered near the ruined Irish castle, twice -- their symbolism escapes me completely.

I was also disappointed with the acts of child abuse throughout the story. A mother abandons her daughter who now cannot speak of it, a the father drags her all over Europe with very little money, meager food and living conditions, while she keeps begging to leave and go home. She is bitten horribly by a dog but Scully doesn't have enough time to have her treated properly when it becomes infected; he spends most of this time drunk, runs from suspicion of murder, and ends up in jail on Christmas Day. I loved him at the beginning of the book when he was preparing a home for his family in Ireland, but hated him by the time the book was done.

The beginning of the book gets a 5 -- the rest of the book is a 1. . .

No one could blame Julieanne Gillis for not seeing the signs. At first her lawyer husband, Leo Steiner, seems to be in a midlife crisis, informing Julieanne that he is planning to take early retirement and go and live on a commune in upstate New York for six months. The next thing she knows, he's vanished, leaving her with three children and only her meager income from her advice column for the Sheboygan, Wis., local newspaper. To make matters worse, she's diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. When things get desperate, Gabe and his 14-year-old sister, Caroline, scan their dad's old e-mails and learn where he might be. Then, during spring break, the two juveniles take off by bus to find their father. They think he'll come home when he learns that their mother is sick. He comes, but the baggage he brings along means further disaster. Leo's behavior is almost unbelievable, but the novel's soap-operatic bathos is perversely satisfying. The convincing portrayal of children involved in the collapse of a marriage add up to a convincing story.

All through this book I just wanted to slap this husband silly!!!!

This book is the first by this author that I have read. I really enjoyed the book up until the last chapter and just didn't like the way the book ended. I suppose I was looking for something more and it didn't materialise.

Blurb:
Walking through new-fallen snow in the forest near their home, twelve year old Nicky Dillon and her father come upon something inconceivable there, in the pristine winter scene, an abandoned infant wails, its survival made possible only by the coincidence of their having chosen this path for their evening stroll.

One of this talented author's lesser efforts -- I read everything by Anita Shreve, but this one did not measure up.

Not long before Christmas 1983, 12-year-old Nicky Dillon and her father Robert, walking in the woods near their house in New Hampshire, come across a baby girl wrapped in a bloody towel, the remnants of her umbilical cord still attached. They race her to the hospital, she survives, and the police launch a hunt for the parents. The Dillons' discovery opens the still-fresh wound inflicted on a mid-December day two years earlier when Nicky's mother and one-year-old sister Clara were killed in a car crash. Robert fled Westchester with his daughter, hoping to escape their memories in rural isolation. When the infant's 19-year-old mother turns up, he doesn't want to have anything to do with her, but he finds he can't turn her in either when a convenient fainting spell and blizzard trap Charlotte in their house. Looking back on these events at age 30—for no evident reason except to give us some reassuring flash-forwards at the close—Nicky mingles the gradual unfolding of Charlotte's story (the rotten father exposed the baby and lied to her about it) with her memories of Mom and Clara and her worries about Dad. A sympathetic local detective's gradual closing in on Charlotte provides the not-very-suspenseful plot movement. The whole tale seems contrived, right down to Nicky's climactic, too-pat confrontation with her father. "Are you just trying to stay sad? To hold on to Mom and Clara?" do not seem like the insights of a 12-year-old. Everything is too easy here, including the fact that we never meet the boy who actually left the newborn to die, so readers can feel comfortably sorry for everyone without having to grapple with any messy moral issues.

I believe this was the first book by Shreve that I read. It was an intense read about a girl that leaves her baby out in the woods to die and the family that comes to take care of it. We had a good discussion about it in my book club.

This was very different from Poisonwood Bible and no where near as good.

Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with two goals: to avoid pregnancy and to get away. She succeeds on both counts when she buys a Volkswagon and heads west. But by the time she pulls up on the outskirts of Tucson at an auto repair shop called Jesus is Lord Used Tires that also happens to be a sanctuary for Central American refugees, she's "inherited" a three-year old American Indian girl named Turtle. Kingsolver is a very readable author.

This is a romp of a book - with feisty female leads, and a network of women each with a unique voice and character.

Taylor manages to survive mid-america without getting saddled with a kid. She takes a trip across the country, and is handed a child, clearly in need of care.

Their relationship and the people they meet along the way make for a fascinating story.

Trying to keep her pregnancy from her husband and mother, Rose checks into St. Elizabeth's, a lovely, old place run by nuns as a home for unwed mothers. Rose plans to give the baby up, believing that she cannot be the mother it needs, but when her time draws near she cannot go through with her plans -- nor can she remain untouched by what she left behind and who she has become in the leaving.

I've had this book on my "to-be-read" list for months. I've picked it up and put it back down countless times. Finally, after an unsuccesful trip to the new releases section of the library, I retreated to the general fiction area and picked up Mrs. Kimble again. This time I actually read it. I'm so glad I did. Mrs. Kimble is one of those books that quickly pulls you and won't let go. Everytime I put it down to actually get some work done, I swear I could hear it calling, "come on, one more chapter."

Mrs. Kimble is the fascinating story of the emotional wake left by one man. Ken Kimble is a chameleon, able to change his background, religion, looks and personality to suit his needs. He uses people as stepping stones to success. In his quest for wealth and fame, he marries three different women and fathers three children. Mrs. Kimble is their story. Ken affects each character, shaping them in various ways. An uneducated housewife is left a single mother. An aging heiress is left brokenhearted and a young waitress in transformed into a socialite. Each story is unique, heart-wrenching and wonderfully written.

I am so glad I finally read this book. From now on, I will not hesitate to grab a Jennifer Haigh novel off the shelf.

There are three ladies with the title of "Mrs. Kimble." Mr. Kimble is a weak, immature character who hops from one "too young" woman to another. The book is at its best when discussing the three ladies.