Beatrice MacNeilCritiques

This was ok...interesting but not great.

Willow and Graham have been in love for years. Inseparable. But he leaves her at the altar, running away after the previous night's rehearsal. I found the premise and motivations a little too simplistic to be believes. Graham leaves because of an easily disproved fake allegation, then accepts a ten-year financial obligation that somehow cannot be terminated. Willow, for some unexplained reason, tries to kill her friend and employer but, coincidentally, someone else does the job first. I felt for Willow's many disappointments but overall, the book was a bit tedious.

p.s. I read Where the White Horses Gallop by the same writer and loved it.½

Random book about a boy and a girl who grow up together, plan to get married, girl gets stood up at the alter, boy comes back years later, girl forgives him.

Loved this book! For lovers of historical fiction especially WW2 era, this is a must read!

I devoured this book in a day!! I normally don't have a lot of time for reading, but once I started this book, the rest of the world went away --- I could not put it down. Another fabulous story from a Cape Bretoner. Love it!

I loved it!

vancouverdeb (in the next review) has said it so well...let me just second her review and recommend this beatifully written book.½

“At ninety-two years of age, she is a riot of blue veins and stains. Strands of loose white hair scatter as if in a wind fire and fly off in every direction from a shrunken skull that has summoned a broken cherub for protection. Her round eyes, a fading day’s blue, widen slowly under a pair of cat’s-eye framed glasses. Thin limbs clamp her into a stooped sphere as she opens the door holding her broom in one hand. She’s not about to be scared off now. Her joints speak to her in a stiff voice as rusty as her own.” (9)

Ivadoile Spears is as feisty and cantankerous as ever she was. Childless and widowed much earlier in life, she sits in her grand old Cape Breton home, Tides Inn, sifting through photographs she has taken from a small cedar box. The images recall to her the people who have passed through her life: casual acquaintances, intimate friends, and loves discovered and lost. Ivadoile muses, and we muse with her, over the eclectic assortment of Tides Inn guests come and gone: Bowzer, a travelling salesman, and his companion an African Grey, Humphrey; Esther Neuland, a lovely woman but pitifully abused; Violet Summers, wealthy, well-travelled, and dying; Ambrose Kane, a southern seaman and lover; Angelo Pinotti, a charming Italian physician from Montreal.

But it is Margaret LaMae, Ivadoile’s long-time employee and neighbour, who remains with the aged proprietor when time has had its way with so many others. Time will shortly have its way with Ivadoile, too, of course. But first, senility will so alter her character that she is at once the woman Margaret always knew and a complete stranger. Ivadoile will disclose the roots of her difficult, quarrelsome self, which have kept her isolated for so many decades. And Margaret will come to realize how fine are the workings of the human heart. “There is everything and nothing in Ivadoile Spears’ eyes. Everything that she remembers and nothing that she can forget.” (201)

The Box of the Dead is beautifully written. In MacNeil’s signature style, the Cape Breton landscape is woven seamlessly into the lives of the characters. Endorsed by such legends as Alistair MacLeod, MacNeil became a favourite when I read Where White Horses Gallop some years ago. This new novel does not disappoint. Highly recommended.

“Dementia is not arrogance. It is life going backwards and colliding with its past self.” (272)

Where White Horses Gallop by Beatrice MacNeil is a book I highly recommend. Beatrice MacNeil is a Nova Scotian writer, and this book gives unique and very touching look into WW11.

It's beautifully written and takes place mainly in a small town in Cape Breton just before and during and after WW11. Three young men, all friends, join up to go abroad fight WW11. What makes this book so special is that it focusses on the family dynamics and struggles of the parents of the young men as they chose to go abroad and how each family responds to their son's going to war, returning from WW11 - if they do. I found it to be very realistic . There are some stories from the war front, but mainly the book focuses on the parents of the young men, and the young men themselves. PTSD and other effects of war are dealt with in this book. It's a very different look at war and I think a realistic one. There are no heroes - just people struggling to cope. It's very different from many other books that take a look at Canada's role in WW11 in that it does not focus on the war front, nor the girlfriends or wives left behind -but rather the young men and their familes.

I found it truly heart breaking and touching and came away feeling much sorrow. It's a beautiful book and one I highly reccomend.

5 stars.

Beautifully written, Where White Horses Gallop is set in Cape Breton, NS. Three young men, all friends, enlist in Canada's military and set sail for Europe in 1941. MacNeil tells their story, and the story of their families. As Alistair MacLeod notes, "Beatrice MacNeil has a brilliant insight into the souls of the wounded."

I was taken with MacNeil's prose from the first page of the prologue. "In spring, when the dandelions were young and saucy, the children had plucked them by the handfuls. Fed them to the brook just to watch them drown. Adults had snapped off their golden round heads and green leaves and spoken openly of the liquid pleasures brewing in their barns. Farmers had sliced away the weeds with a vengeance, leaving their slaughtered bodies to the wind for burial." (7)

A must read!

very good....touching, poignant, a different view of WWII

this book is from the public library too if you are also wondering where is it from too.½