A Book
Review
by Joy
Renee
Brown Eyes Blue
By Carolyn Meyer
Bridge Works
Publishing
© 2003
228
p
Genre: Literary; Women in fiction; Mothers and daughters in fiction
Dorcas, in her mid fifties and still unable to grasp the happiness she has so longed for, returns to the town of her youth when news reaches her that her eighty-year-old mother, Lavinia, who had made a name for herself with her landscape paintings that featured the local Amish community, has now exhibited several shocking nude portraits. She more than half expected to find her mother in some state of dementia but instead encounters a more lucid and self-possessed woman than she ever remembered. Or is it just easier to identify with her now that she is moving out the back end of her own middle-age and has the experience of watching her own twenty-something daughter, Sasha, moving through her young-adulthood suffering the consequences of impetuous choices. Page by page the stories of these three women are interwove. They each have secrets they have kept from each other. They each have gained a hard-earned wisdom from their passage though life. And the ever-elusive happiness seems more easily graspable when ‘convention’ is given a back-seat and passions are given free reign.
© 2004 by Joy Renee Davis