The initial chapters of this book leave you awash with imagery and sensation. You can almost taste lobster, the butter dripping down your chin. You’re awed by the size of a house that has a vegetable garden in the back and a front lawn that seems to stretch for miles towards palm trees.
But the human element is sharp within these milieus. There is a guilt-ridden father who has sent his daughter away to protect her from war but allows her to blame her mother. There is the mother, furious at her husband after she’d begged for him to send the girl to the country rather than out of the country. There are the opulent Gregorys, including a mother nervous at dealing with a foreign child. All of this exposes Beatrix to a life she’s never known but one already brimming with comfort and familial love.
Right from the start, we are exposed to the adult Beatrix’s nostalgic longing for the America she left behind even as we are then thrust into a goodbye fraught with the anguish of worried parents preparing for martial conflict. Even in the midst of threat from remote enemies, you feel the tug of the sea that brackets Beatrix’s memories.
But the human element is sharp within these milieus. There is a guilt-ridden father who has sent his daughter away to protect her from war but allows her to blame her mother. There is the mother, furious at her husband after she’d begged for him to send the girl to the country rather than out of the country. There are the opulent Gregorys, including a mother nervous at dealing with a foreign child. All of this exposes Beatrix to a life she’s never known but one already brimming with comfort and familial love.
Right from the start, we are exposed to the adult Beatrix’s nostalgic longing for the America she left behind even as we are then thrust into a goodbye fraught with the anguish of worried parents preparing for martial conflict. Even in the midst of threat from remote enemies, you feel the tug of the sea that brackets Beatrix’s memories.