A Backward Glance

Hi Bookworms. How is everyone? Are you caught up in the East Coast snowstorm? We are getting some inches of snow here but nothing too major.

Earlier in the week we just had brown fields, which you can see from the photo. We like to walk up this hill that’s a street away from us and see the sunset. It’s peaceful and the dogs like to get out. It’s good for my knee rehab to go up and down stairs and hills. As long as it doesn’t swell up, I’ll keep at it.

Meanwhile last week I finished this puzzle with some contributions from my husband — large and small — along the way. It’s of a bookstore called The World’s Best Books where some books of children’s classics can be seen through the window. Books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Travels of Babar, Alice in Wonderland, Gulliver Travels, The Jungle Book, The Wizard of Oz, and many more guided me through piecing it together. It was fun and kept me away from doomscrolling the news too too much. I particularly like that there’s a bicycle outside the bookshop.

And now I will leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately.

The Irish Goodbye by Heather Aimee O’Neill / Holt / 288 pages / 2025

3.75 stars. I soon learned that this debut novel is not set in Ireland but on Long Island, N.Y. The title refers to the act of leaving a location or event without saying goodbye (duh on me). It’s about an Irish-American family (the Ryans) that is rocked by a boating accident that kills one of the son’s close friends, which happens when the kids are teens at the onset of the book. The victim’s family sues the Ryan parents since they think their son (Topher) was responsible.

Decades later — the story begins in earnest when the three sisters in the Ryan family are grown and headed to a big family gathering during Thanksgiving week at their childhood home on Long Island where their parents still live. The sisters are all in different situations: Maggie, a teacher, is gay and bringing home a new girlfriend; Cait, a lawyer who lives in London, is divorced with twins; and Alice, looking to pursue interior design, is married with two sons. Their brother’s Topher absence is felt and you soon find out what’s happened to him.

Once home it turns into a tumultuous Thanksgiving week with the siblings all affected by the past and secrets they keep in their lives in various ways. Then when Cait invites to Thanksgiving dinner an old high school boyfriend — who was the brother of the boy killed in the boating accident — things about the painful past come to the forefront and get dished out.

The Irish Goodbye is a family domestic tale in which the chapters alternate narration among the three sisters, whose relationships with each other, their parents, and their spouses are delved into. The sisters are a bit flawed but their tale is a winding tragic and redemptive one, and the audiobook narrated by Kristen Sieh kept me fairly engaged throughout. Just don’t send me on a dicey family Thanksgiving week like that!

A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton / Scribner / 1934

4 stars. A fascinating, complex lady was author Edith Wharton … fluent in various languages, she was a truly gifted writer, a bookworm, an avid traveler, a dog lover, an adventurer, a gardener, and aide worker in WWI, and also very socially connected to her intellectual well-to-do friends … as well as much more.

She started her life in New York City in 1862 and was “born into a world in which telephones, motors, electric light, central heating (except by hot-air furnaces), X-rays, cinemas, radium, aeroplanes and wireless telegraphy were not only unknown but still mostly unforeseen.” Those changes all happened during her life.

I hoped to find out all about her in her autobiography … but much of it I found was lists of friends and acquaintances and little anecdotes about her travels. At times I seemed to read more about her good many friends, especially her good friend author Henry James than I did about Edith herself.

Still there’s also small nuggets of info I gleaned about Edith along the way including her years up until WWI, where all she lived, and how she started her literary career. For years, her family lived in New York (or for months in Europe) and then would summer in Newport, Rhode Island, and then later she bought a house in Lenox, Mass., which she called The Mount. How she loved The Mount, which was her country home where she lived for 10 years from 1902 to 1911. Her and her friends would motor all about the countryside in their new motor cars. She was most happiest at home there amidst her garden, and it is where she wrote her novels The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome.

Edith probably would’ve stayed at The Mount but her husband’s declining health (apparently from mental health issues) affected their lives together. She divorced him in 1913, which she doesn’t talk about in the book, and moved to France to start a new life. There she became involved in aide work during WWI and made a hefty contribution.

She was an active lady. It’s amazing all what she did — half of which is not mentioned in her autobiography including that she went on to be the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921 for her novel The Age of Innocence. Still I was glad to read a bit about her life and her world back then in her own words.

I figured her autobiography would be good background for the online class I’m taking this Friday on her novel The House of Mirth, which I’m in the midst of reading. It also counts for the Nonfiction Reader Challenge I’m doing. And don’t you love the cover of this edition of A Backward Glance (above) with her dog. So sweet.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these authors and what did you think?