Margaret Bradham Thornton

I really enjoyed this book. I was prompted to read it after listening to a presentation the author made about her subsequent book. She explained that for her the goal of writing a novel is to explore important questions.
One question in this instance could be: how can you go home again and what does home mean to you.
Tennessee Williams puts in an appearance - clearly Thornton has a deep personal connection to his work and a deep interest in many aspects of his life.
There is a dual protagonist: Eliza who returns to Charleston while completing some research, and Charleston the city.
I felt I had a much richer understanding of Charleston after completing the book.
A good book needs 2 fundamental qualities in my perspective: 1) a good story that draws the reader in; and 2) characters that become real to the reader and rich enough in development that the reader cares about what happens to them.
Charleston the book succeeds in both tests.… (meer)

I recently had the pleasure of hearing the author do a presentation on her work. She explained that for her, writing novels is a way of exploring questions about the human condition.
If asked most could provide a definition of love, but when in a relationship it is a more complex thing incorporating who we are or think we are, and who the other is or who we think the other is.
Contemporary psychology teaches that there are many limits to self understanding. I have come to think of love as a special kind of friendship.
Her description of the couple loosing the sense of the boundary between their bodies while in bed seems to be part of it. Still aging brings ceertain stubornneses and personality quirks to the fore so in some ways our sense of self as unique increases.
Part of love must be allowing an other to be who they are - accepting them as they are - perhaps that is what the couple is acheiving as the novel ends.
The author mentioned that she wrote several different endings for the book.
The ending she used has a bit of the lady and the tiger to it. The reader doesn’t know what will happen to the couple - do they have quantum entanglement.
For me the test of a good story is do the charactrers become real to my mind. I would say that is true in this book. The author also says one of the reasons she writes is that she likes beautiful sentences - a good foundation for any book.… (meer)

This novel needed a good editor before it was published. I read the first 7 chapters, and realized that, so far, much of the writing was just filller and that the story at this point could have been pared down to 3 chapters.
At this point I wasn't interested in reading the rest of the book just to find out if the main character chose to stay with her old flame in Charleston, or if she decided to fly back to England to spend the rest of her life with her new boyfriend. So I skipped everything after ch.7 and read the last 2 chapters to see how the author ended the dilemma.
A lot of readers just loved this book, but I'm glad that I didn't invest the time to read the in between pages - Hah!… (meer)