Nico’s sister Margaret was four years older than her and all that she was not. She was slim, attractive to opposite sex, a talented singer, and looking forward to going to college in the fall. Although their family was close and their parents were former hippies, Margaret wasn’t especially getting along with them. Her father didn’t approve of her boyfriend, Aaron, and her mother fought with her about smoking because of her heart condition. One summer Sunday the sisters were sunbathing out in the lake on their boat. They could hear their mother practicing at the piano in their lake front house. Nico was curious about all the things that Margaret was and wondering if she would ever be like her. Even still, Nico couldn’t help bringing up her sister’s smoking habit. When Margaret had enough, she saluted Nico and dove into the lake. She was never seen alive again. At age 13, Nico had to learn to navigate the waters of a life of kept secrets while haunted by a sister who seemed so nearly perfect.
Goldengrove is a lyrical look at life after a tragic loss. The way that time, place, and emotion are described is really beautiful. The language Prose used was interesting in and of itself, specifically just after Margaret dies. Her use of words made scenes where Nico and her parents couldn’t sleep very powerful. You could see them in different places within the house trying to keep quiet, knowing all along that they were fooling no one into believing they were sleeping. Their mourning was almost poetic.

The loss of Margaret didn’t quite bring the family closer together. It cut a hole between her parents and between parents and “only remaining child.” Nico isn’t sure if there is anyone who can understand what she’s going through except for Aaron. As she kept Margaret’s secret dates with Aaron, Nico begins seeing him in secret as well. Together they feel as though they can cross sacred ground. They both were trying to recapture Margaret by using each other and it was when this storyline got deep that I felt that the beauty of the prose was lost for a while. It’s lyrical quality was broken. Going from lyrical to creepy just didn’t work well for me. I think this was true to Nico’s experience as well and didn’t really disrupt my enjoyment. I just wish some of the harder aspects of Nico’s summer with Aaron had that same poetic quality.

Goldengrove is the first novel I’ve read by Francine Prose. It sounds strange to say that I really enjoyed a novel that deals with the aftermath of losing a sibling during childhood, but I did. The language was beautiful and engaging almost entirely throughout. I would be interested to know if this novel would seem as lifelike and honest to someone who has experienced the loss of a sibling during childhood. I was enchanted by the cover and the novel did not disappoint. I am looking forward to reading more of Prose’s work. ( )

It was meant to be an idyllic summer – a summer like all the ones before it. But when thirteen year old Nico’s older sister Margaret dives into Mirror Lake and never surfaces, everything changes. Set in New England, Goldengrove is the story of that fateful summer. Narrated in the provocative and compelling voice of Nico, the novel reveals the cracks in a family which widen with the tragedy. Nico, on the cusp of womanhood, finds herself floating free without the sage advice of her sister. Nico connects with Margaret’s boyfriend, the artistic and slightly strange Aaron – a person whom she feels free to share her stories of Margaret and the pain of loss. But Aaron is also struggling with Margaret’s death…and in Nico he sees the young woman who he once loved.

As the summer slips by, Aaron and Nico’s relationship inches towards a dangerous conclusion … and Nico must struggle to move from adolescence into adulthood, and come to an understanding of her own needs in the wake of her sister’s death.

Francine Prose’s novel is that of grief, recovery, and the search for one’s identity. Tender, yet realistic, Goldengrove explores the impact of suddenly losing a child and a sibling. Although the story is told from Nico’s point of view, Prose gives the reader a glimpse into the devastation such a loss has on parents.

Prose does a remarkable job building her characters. Nico’s father’s relationship with his youngest daughter is flawlessly portrayed. Nico clings to her father, wants the connection with him, but also pushes him away as she discovers her own sexuality and desires. Their love of art and reading binds them together, even when everything else seems to be changing.

I read this novel late into the night – drawn to Nico and her journey through grief. Prose writes radiantly and with a deep understanding of her characters. If there is a flaw in the novel, it is the ending when Prose lifts the reader away from Mirror Lake and the adolescent Nico, and transports us into Nico’s life as an adult. I would have preferred the book end on page 264 – still drenched in late summer sun with a hopeful glimpse into the future.

Despite this minor complaint, Goldengrove is a book I can recommend for its beautiful writing and tender look at a young girl growing up in the wake of tragedy. ( )

My third read by Francine Prose bore some resemblance to Blue Angel, which was a disturbing book for an English professor to read. It involves a sexy, manipulative student who plunges an instructor into a world of chaos. Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, the first I read, had so much clarity and good sense, it drove me to her fiction. I foresee another dozen titles by Prose on my bookshelves.

The narrator, Nico, lives in an idyllic, lake-side cottage with her father, who owns a book store named Goldengrove, her mother -- a piano teacher -- and her sister, Margaret. Margaret has a secret life, and after a tragedy, Nico seems headed into secrets of her own. I felt the same sense of foreboding I experienced with Blue Angel while reading Goldengrove, but her spectacular, lyrical prose has an element of poetry in every line, and that alone drove me on to the tense ending.

I underlined numerous wonderful lines, for example: “Now we acted as if the tiniest pressure could shatter our eggshell selves” (84) and “That Sunday, that first Sunday in May, was so warm I couldn’t help wondering: Was it simply a beautiful day, or a symptom of global warming? Even the trees looked uncomfortable, naked and embarrassed, as if they were all simultaneously having that dream in which you look down and realize you’ve forgotten to put on your clothes” (2). Well, I have had that dream, and I know exactly how Nico feels in this scene.

This psychological portrait of a family dealing with loss calls to mind Tolstoy’s opening line of Anna Karenina. To paraphrase, all members of an unhappy family handle their unhappiness in different ways. However, this book never really strikes a sustained depressing note. 5 stars

--Jim, 10/11/09 ( )

13-year-old Nico was literally the last person to see her older sister Margaret alive. Margaret was a gifted singer and actress about to graduate from high school, and the girls were spending a lazy Sunday afternoon out on the lake in their family's rowboat. Margaret decided to dive from the boat into the lake and swim to shore, but she never came back up.

The shock of Margaret's sudden loss pushes the remaining members of the family in separate directions, rather than pulling them closer together. While her mother seeks to escape with prescription drugs and her father retreats to his bookstore, Goldengrove, and the book he's been writing for years, Nico seeks to connect with her sister's spirit; that leads her to the company of Margaret's artist boyfriend Aaron, who may be even more haunted than Nico is.

Francine Prose writes Goldengrove in Nico's voice, which keeps the focus squarely on her, and I thought that was a particularly appropriate narrative choice. Nico is 13, a particularly self-focused age; parents start to recede in importance, peers matter more, and everything is filtered through self-reference. The parental characters in Goldengrove seemed underdeveloped to me, but that also seemed correct; they've both pulled back in response to their elder child's death, while at the same time, Nico has reached an age where she's naturally beginning to grow in her own direction, and her own development matters more to her than anyone else's. I don't mean that to sound negative; it's a normal part of adolescence, and the crisis that Nico and her family are experiencing just makes it more pronounced. There is growth and development over the course of the summer and the story - for both Nico and her parents - and while I thought the ending was perhaps a little too neat, it was credible. Sometimes "moving on" happens so gradually that we don't realize we've done it until some time later, but sometimes it takes a conscious decision.

While reading Goldengrove, I kept returning to a recent discussion of YA literature. While this has been published and marketed as an adult novel, I think one could make a convincing case for it as young-adult literature. It's thoughtful and beautifully written, and while its themes of grief, loss and developing maturity are serious ones, they're not inappropriate for older high-school students. But if the distinguishing characteristic of YA is "a teenage protagonist," both its narrator and its perspective would seem to make this novel fit within that genre.

The Short of It:

An unsettling look at what happens to a family when a loved one is suddenly no more.

The Rest of It:

I've often wondered about death. Death that results from illness is quite different than a death that results from an accident or a sudden heart attack. In this novel, Margaret dies suddenly. Her family has no time to prepare themselves for the loss and for Nico, Margaret's younger sister, it's as if Margaret is there one minute and gone the next. How does a family deal with such a loss?

As Nico struggles with her grief, she realizes that Aaron, Margaret's boyfriend is really the only person that understands what she is going through. They form an unlikely friendship which at times seems inappropriate but seeing what these two have been through, and what Margaret meant to them, all I saw were two people in a lot of pain trying desperately to overcome their grief.

Francine Prose does a remarkable job of describing what Nico is feeling and although Margaret was not on the page for long, you definitely get a feel for her personality as these characters look back on their moments with her. Many have said that Nico seems older than her thirteen years. This may be true, but to me she came across as an 'old soul' which made her relationship with Aaron a bit easier for me to understand.

As Prose takes us through the novel, Nico sees signs that Margaret is still with her. I've always been fascinated by signs. They function as a form of comfort and generally exist to help us through a crisis. Prose does a wonderful job of providing comfort to Nico in the way of signs and whether or not you believe they exist in real life doesn't really matter, because they exist realistically within the novel.

I had one small quibble with Aaron. At the beginning of the novel, a comment is made which might lead the reader to think that all is not right with Aaron. As I was reading, I kept waiting for that secret to be revealed but in my opinion nothing was revealed. I felt that his actions were motivated by his loss so perhaps I missed something there.

This novel was a very quick read. Once I started it, I could not put it down. The prose was easy to follow and I cared about the characters and what they were going through. This was my first experience with Prose's writing style but it definitely won't be my last. ( )