The setting first takes us to Pontiac County, Quebec, around 1900 where Irish famine farmers and French Canadians had settled along the St. Lawrence River and eventually moved into the hinterlands of Quebec, hoping to farm and cut more trees.

An old priest had been vanquished from New York to a remote Canadian parish after depleting the local Catholic coffers in magnanimous acts of generosity to those he loved.  Being a bon vivant of sorts, a connoisseur of things worldly and lover of lost souls,  the old priest develops a relationship with the O’Briens, a family of three boys, two girls and a strikingly beautiful but rough edged mother.  He will teach them the things he loves, teach them diligently as he had been taught himself and inspire in these children a love of geometry, manners, how to waltz.

The oldest son Joe particularly tugs at his heart, not in a sensual way but in a type of recognition of similar souls, lost in the cosmos and Quebec woods.  Joe will become the heart of this saga that spans the years 1900 to 1960 and take us across North America, especially the coast of California around Venice Beach and ultimately back to Montreal and the sailing coasts of Maine.

Joe’s father, in reckless pursuit of adventure, had died in South Africa.  Joe, being the oldest, becomes the automatic head of the household, confident, strong and stocky until the mother remarries a ne’er do well whose only claim to fame is as an obsessive fiddler whose wretched behavior towards his step children will lead them to a necessary act of kidnapping where the kids do the napping and the adult is the one literally kicked out of town.
Joe has a gift for numbers, accounting, organization and his own true father’s sense of adventure.  All these talents will eventually earn him a fortune, the love of a strong willed woman and four children.  Their lives will span two world wars and touch on events all the way up to JFK’s presidency.
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Those wars will take their toll on this family that revolved around the relationship of Joe and Iseult whom he meets in Venice Beach, California.  It’s a raw marriage, passionate yet cold, heartbreaking, replete with separation, boredom, coldness, longing, a center that might not hold.  A very curious marriage that finds us rooting for its demise and intermittently holding out for that something special, that momentous event that will draw them back together.  Joe will go to New York for drinking sprees; Iseult will fall under the spell of the California coast and the guru Krishnamurti himself.
It’s a beautiful story, a big sweep through history and the dynamics of a troubled family.  Yet, there is a strength and beauty in this imperfect relationship bolstered by the physical landscape at both ends of our country.  The land and the people dance together and they retreat like boxers in a ring, often coming out fighting, victors not always clear.
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This is a very satisfying novel that totally engaged this reader just as did PBS Masterpiece Theatre’s Downton Abbey and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Like Downton Abbey, it’s the story of fortune and loss, love and war.  Like Freedom, it’s about a family rocked by the cultural and historical events around them but somehow forming a center sometimes slipping into the void and sometimes sliding into a place of quiet contentment.
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