A Fall of Marigolds Author: Susan Meissner | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DMCV21E | Format: EPUB
A Fall of Marigolds Description
A beautiful scarf, passed down through the generations, connects two women who learn that the weight of the world is made bearable by the love we give away.... September 1911. On Ellis Island in New York Harbor, nurse Clara Wood cannot face returning to Manhattan, where the man she loved fell to his death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Then, while caring for a fevered immigrant whose own loss mirrors hers, she becomes intrigued by a name embroidered onto the scarf he carries…and finds herself caught in a dilemma that compels her to confront the truth about the assumptions she’s made. Will what she learns devastate her or free her?
September 2011. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, widow Taryn Michaels has convinced herself that she is living fully, working in a charming specialty fabric store and raising her daughter alone. Then a long-lost photograph appears in a national magazine, and she is forced to relive the terrible day her husband died in the collapse of the World Trade Towers…the same day a stranger reached out and saved her. Will a chance reconnection and a century-old scarf open Taryn’s eyes to the larger forces at work in her life?
- File Size: 1249 KB
- Print Length: 401 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 045141991X
- Publisher: NAL (February 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DMCV21E
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,049 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Kim
*Beware of possible Spoilers*
a-fall-of-marigolds-susan-meissnerI give this book 5 stars because of the complexity of the story and they way Susan Meissner wove these two characters together. I actually cried.
Have you ever experienced something so traumatic that your heart and mind can’t wrap itself around it, then to only throw yourself into living but not actually living but just on automation. It’s call the in between place, it’s a place where you are stuck until something or someone finally shoves you into the present where you have to face the past so that there may be a future.
Here we have a story of two different women in a different place and time, one in 2011 and the other in 1911, but both have loved and lost. They both play the horror that’s befallen on them in their mind one way and to find out it’s not the truth as they thought it was.
In present day Tayrn works at a shop that deals in fabric called Heirloom Yard with her best friend Celine, after her husband dies in theattack of 9/11, she has to let go of their home and move into the apartment above the shop. The day of the attack after years of trying, she found out she was pregnant. Sadly, she didn’t get the news to her husband before he perished. So today she’s working and living above the shop trying to raise their daughter.
Then her worst nightmare comes true, a picture of her among the ashes of the twin towers emerges 10 years later and she is finally going to have to face the truth about the day she lost her husband and the day that left her unborn child fatherless. How is she going to be able to tell her daughter the truth of that day when she can’t even face it?
Reading a book by Susan Meissner is like treating yourself to fine chocolate. Her last work was a masterpiece that left me aching to return to Italy. She is a masterful storyteller.
So, when I knew she had a new book releasing, I didn't hesitate to enter a Goodreads giveaway for a copy, even though I knew next to nothing about the story. And I won!
A Fall of Marigolds has been sitting on my shelf for a few months while I tackled other reviews, but I recently finished it and can easily say this book makes my top whatever list of best books I've ever read.
The book opens in Manhattan 2011 with Taryn, a woman whose husband died in the Twin Towers on 9/11. She works in a specialty fabric store and lives above it with her 9-year-old daughter. A picture of her from the day of the tragedy surfaces suddenly and the quiet life she thought she'd gotten on with is disturbed.
Intertwined with her story is that of Clara, a nurse working on Ellis Island in 1911. She was a witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and has come to the island to escape the memories of her loss that day.
Both stories are steeped in heavy sadness, and honestly, I've been avoiding stories, documentaries and movies about 9/11 since the day it happened because I can sometimes still feel the weight of the national despair. I don't often lean in to pain, and I might have been more hesitant to read this story if I'd known that was part of it.
And I won't lie. This story is not all feel-good. There are heart-wrenching scenes as these two women, separated by a century of time, allow themselves to grieve the past and open their lives to the present and future. I had to set it down a few times and let the feelings sink in and pass before starting again.
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