Description:

From Publishers Weekly

The title of Jensen's posthumous debut adequately sums up its tone and economic milieu. Spanning the years 1916 to 1987, the novel offers vignettes from the lives of sisters Idella and Avis Hillock, opening with an account of their mother's death in childbirth and closing with Idella's husband, Eddie, now an old man, reminiscing about his life with Idella. The Hillock girls spent their early years in the rough landscape of New Brunswick, Canada, where grief and hard living have damaged their widowed father. Eventually, Idella escapes to New England, where she finds a husband and her own domestic troubles. Younger, more attractive sister Avis has an even harder path ahead; after attracting the ardor of her father's friends as a teen, she embarks on a series of damaging romantic entanglements. This has an unfinished feel to it (Jensen died unpublished in 2003), and while the sisters' troubled relationship rings true, the story-like chapters feel quite independent of one another, and the dialogue has a tendency to veer into forced colloquialisms and melodrama. Readers will be left wondering what else Jensen might have written had her career not been cut short. (July)
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From

Jensen’s tale of two sisters begins in New Brunswick. When their mother dies, Idella and Avis are left in the care of their father, who is overwhelmed by the tasks of raising a household of several young children and eking out a meager living on a potato farm. The book—a series of interconnected stories, really—follows Idella and Avis as they grow up and move to America. Idella ends up in Maine with a wandering husband and a frightful mother-in-law. Avis, the wilder one, lives in Boston and goes through what she describes as “a shitload of men.” The book encompasses more than 70 years, and the early chapters, especially the one in which a French Canadian girl named Maddie comes to help out on the farm, are the strongest. If the later sections read more like family memoir being forced into a fictional shape, they are nevertheless notable for vivid writing and strong characterizations. Jensen died before seeing any of her work published; this is a fine tribute. --Mary Ellen Quinn