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    She Was: A Novel
    Unavailable
    She Was: A Novel
    Unavailable
    She Was: A Novel
    Ebook365 pages4 hours

    She Was: A Novel

    By Janis Hallowell

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Doreen Woods lives an ordinary life. She is a respected dentist, her son has just graduated from high school, and her husband teaches fifth grade. The one flaw is that her brother, Adam, has MS. Even that isn't all that extraordinary. . . . Then, out of nowhere, Janey Marks shows up, bringing the past with her.

    In 1971 Doreen was young, idealistic Lucy Johansson. Adam was back from Vietnam, damaged and bitter. Caught up in the anti-war movement Lucy committed a crime that changed everything for both of them.

    She Was spans America, coast to coast, over four decades, to give us the story of one young woman who, like many of her generation, tried to change the world and how, thirty-four years later, in a world that still needs changing, she must pay the consequences.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 17, 2009
    ISBN9780061873409
    Unavailable
    She Was: A Novel
    Author

    Janis Hallowell

    Janis Hallowell, author of The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn, is a MacDowell Fellow, and her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares. She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughter.

    Read more from Janis Hallowell

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    Reviews for She Was

    3.5/5

    11 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      good book
    • 2/5
      Denver author Hallowell (author of The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn) has created a character study of a fugitive war protestor from the sixties who’s lived a respectable life as a wife, mother and dentist for thirty-four years since the accidental death of a janitor in a Columbia University Vietnam War protest bombing. At the same time, her brother, Adam, is suffering from MS and recurring flashbacks to his time spent fighting in Vietnam. The pacing is considered and careful and the characterizations are believable, but, overall the story was only mildly gripping. Not bad – just not super compelling. Some war violence in the flashbacks.
    • 5/5
      SHE WAS Hallowell is a deft craftswoman, and her novel, an absolutely must read, is a masterful braiding of two counterpoint stories: Doreen the passionate anti-Vietnam war Weather Underground activist who plants a bomb that inadvertently kills a man, and her brother Adam, who serves in that war only to prove to their father that he’s not a coward—neither realizing that their choice will have unintended repercussions which will dictate the shape of their lives. Vietnam wasn’t the front line for freedom, Adam realizes, or the thumb in the dike of communism, or any of that bullshit. Once you’d been in-country for a week or two you realized that in Vietnam there weren’t any fronts. The only reason you had a gun and were humping those hills for gooks was because Command wished it. And the only way you were going to survive it was to do whatever you had to do and stay as high as possible. The portrait of Adam, who in the war’s aftermath, is a walking casualty (MS ironically renders him mostly immobile), is riveting, and his honoring of the Vietnamese monks who burned themselves in protest against the war is deeply affecting. The contrasting, counterpoint and back-and-forth between these two story lines is a brilliant move, in which we see the horrific and senseless violence of the war which Doreen in her youthful idealism hoped to prevent. The contrast skyrockets after the war when Adam comes out of the closet and lives his homosexuality honestly and openly, while Doreen, who deeply regrets the death she caused, chooses to go underground and live a lie—hiding her true identity and constructing a good citizen’s productive life as a dentist, a life which is as resoundingly false as it is real. Hallowell is a master of characterization, setting and plot—all those elements with which one builds a novel, and the contrasting counterpoint and reverse parallelism in the book’s structure is more than compelling—this is a book that keeps you up at night, reading on and on! Go get it!