Product Description

When Cara dies in a car crash, Pen is left to cope with a secret widowhood. This novel follows Pen through the week following Cara's death, through her grief and the ecstasy of nostalgia of their 13-years together, to a point where mourning and making a new life melt into one.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #157639 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Customer Reviews

Moving, sexy, funny and moving again, in that order
This is Emma Donoghue's second novel, and is the one that her fans had been hoping she'd write; bigger, more ambitious, tougher, dealing with the pain of bereavement and the even more elusive pain of having to hide your grief. Donoghue is brilliant at getting inside the curiously detached and stunned psyche of her main character, Pen (another one of Donoghue's suggestive character names: the dead lover is called Cara, the lover's father - with whom the two women lived - is Mr Wall. Symbolism ahoy!) Once again, her technique of dramatising feelings by behaviour rather than by indigestible flights of interior monologue pays off. Pen gobbles cakes on the bus and then pukes them into a bush; she fantasises about making a pass at her lover's emigre sister. The days go by and she seems no closer to having any definite feelings about her lover's death, or her current predicament. Hood has more respect for its minor characters than Donoghue's earlier Stir-Fry, probably because the characters are older and not being seen through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old. As it says on the back cover, it's a kind of hymn to the pleasure of feeling ordinary; in a sense, you could say that of all her books, but this one dramatises it particularly well. Beautifully written, intelligent and unsentimental. A lovely book.

Powerful, passionate and full of dignity.
Emma Donaghue provides us with a enigmatic look at just a splinter of what it feels like to lose somebody you love and bear all this pain in secret. She writes supremely making the reader believe this story with all the small details of what being in a relationship is all about, the fighting, and not forgetting the making up. It is one of the most powerful stories that I have ever read and helps me belive that sometimes you are not on your own.

A good look at relationships
Most books have a beginning, middle and end, and this book starts at the end. I found myself, while turning the pages looking for the story line, trying to figure out the plot.

It seem's though, that there is no plot, there doesn't seem to be a goal for any of the characters, apart from Pen trying to force herself to cry and feel the grief she feel's she is expected to feel for her dead lover.

What emerges from Pen's grief are relationships which seem more real than those found in any love story. We watch as Cara's hold over Pen continues to dictate Pen's life even after Cara has died, and Pen tries to regain her independance.

Not a very entertaining read, but certainly one to start the mind ticking about your own relationships.