Martha Woodroof

Embarking on a road trip is unfathomable without an audiobook to pass the long, boring driving hours across the very large State of Texas, and I don’t always end up with one I want to listen to for 10 hours. This past weekend, however, I totally lucked out and listened to Martha Woodroof’s Small Blessings, narrated by the incomparable Lorelei King.

I happen to really enjoy campus stories, so my antenna went up when I read the summary of this novel. It’s set on a small college campus and populated by the most amazing characters. Tom Putnam is an English professor, married for two decades to a fragile woman with a mental illness, and he just barely gets through the day with the help of his mother-in-law, Agnes. He had a 9 day affair ten years ago with a visiting poetess which sent his wife, Marjorie, off the deep end; and he learned his lesson about trying to have a life different from the one he is trapped in. Tom has a friend, Russell, who is a blow-hard and recovering alcoholic, and who lives to torment the cranky, aggressive Iris, a professor with some addiction issues of her own.

One day a woman named Rose Callahan arrives to manage the college bookshop, a little boy named Henry arrives on a train claiming to be Tom’s son, and none of the characters in this story will ever be the same. Filled with entertaining prose, snappy dialogue, extremely well-developed characters, and a hint of mystery, Small Blessings will just steal your heart right out of your chest.

Listening to the narrative on my road-trip had me nodding my head, smirking, huffing with laughter, and it squeezed my heart with profoundness, as well. It reminded me that when life seems to be going off the rail, that new direction might be the one we’re supposed to be on after all. I need more stories like this one!… (meer)