On David Wheaton's deathbed his present and former wives and offspring have gathered with him on his beloved boat. A major regret is not performing as the Biblical King David in a play never quite finished by his son-in-law playwright. Daughter Emma is forced to confront the pains and good times of her father's serial marriages. ( )

This was a beautiful, life-affirming tale centered around the days a daughter spends with her dying father, remembering the past and the missteps of their large family, but ultimately reconciling with mature realization to accept imperfection and embrace the hope and quest for joy and love. The father is a renowned and charismatic actor, and the daughter is one of his very many children by very many wives. The parallels to the life of King David -- the unplayed role at the center of an unfinished play -- are effective and provide a meaningful structure for the narrative and the characters' insights. The writing is gentle and soft, a bit anachronistic for an era of sharper insights and cynicism, but it makes for a comforting, pleasant and uplifting reading experience. ( )

Summary: As actor David Wheaton dies of cancer, his daughter joins him on the Portia and as they re-read the unfinished script of Emma's estranged husband Nik on King David, they consider the parallels with their own lives, and struggle to come to terms with life in its brokenness, and its joys.

Madeleine L'Engle was best know for her Young Adult fiction work, A Wrinkle in Time, and the sequels to that work. For a time she was married to a successful actor, who she lost to cancer, and wrote about in several works, and I suspect draws upon in writing this. It was my familiarity with her other work that led me to pick up this book when I spotted it in a second hand store (I don't believe it is in print at present).

The story is that of the last summer of actor, David Wheaton, dying of cancer, diagnosed as he finished one of the ultimate roles of his life, playing King Lear, in which his daughter Emma also had a role. Now Emma, estranged from playwright husband Nik, is with him on the Portia, along with David's ninth wife (!) Alice, a physician, cruising the waters of the Pacific Northwest, David's favorite place to be when not in New York.

As David muses and tries to sum up his life, he keeps turning to an unfinished play Nik was writing, on the life and wives of King David. Nik had envisioned Wheaton in the title role, and as David reads sections of the unfinished script, he considers the parallels between King David and his wives, and his own nine marriages, the children from those marriages, and both the wondrous moments, and the brokenness such an unusual family inevitably brings.

It is not only David who is attempting to come to peace with and work out the relationships and mistakes of his life. Emma, relatively fresh from separating from Nik, also is wrestling with what had come between them, and the loves and losses she experienced in this family as well, again with parallels to the family of David. Yet oddly, although her parallel is Tamar, it is Abigail, David's second wife to whom she is drawn, as well as to David Wheaton's second wife who comes to visit, also an Abigail, who share with her the experience of losing children.

Eventually, a number of the surviving family arrive, along with Nik. Key in this narrative is the question is how do we come to terms with brokenness and failure, and the paradox of both a love of life, and the darkness of our flawed beings and that we often bring down upon ourselves and others? And with that is the question of what it means to choose life, and love while being these kind of people. Perhaps this is captured most succinctly in a question described by a wise Native American woman, Norma, who spoke of being at a crossroads in her own life and having to choose between a funeral, and a wedding.

Much of this is a story of the wives, and the daughter, Emma, that loved David Wheaton, and much of the conversation, remembered or present occurs between these women, particularly between Emma, Alice, and Abby. The dialogue between these women is perhaps what makes this book stand out, as they listen, choose to uncover pain, explore, wonder and tenderly share whatever wisdom is to be had at the time. At one point, they talk about "friendships of the heart," in contrast to romantic relationships, particularly between those of the same gender. There is a kind of understanding, of care in the relationships in this book that indeed characterize such friendship of the heart, that is far too rare, and wonderful to behold in this work.

If indeed this work is out of print, I hope it will not always be so. There is a quality of writing here to be savored, even as it wrestles with both life and death, and the dynamics of human relationships, particularly within families and between men and women. One senses in this a writer who wrote out of her own rich experiences of love, loss, brokenness, and yet joy in life, in which every word of dialogue seems to ring true. ( )

Emma's father David is dying after being larger than life with his family and theater career. He has been obsessed with the Biblical story of David, and always hoped to act the part in a play written by Emma's husband Nik, especially given the parallels in their stories. Emma's life has been dominated by her father's multiple wives, her many step- siblings, her own acting career, and tragedies that are disclosed during the course of her farewell visit with her dying father. I found the relationships engrossing and complex, but for me the Biblical exposition became tedious enough that I found myself skipping much of it. ( )

I appreciate the rhythm of L'Engle's prose and development (which I first got a real sense of when I read A Severed Wasp.) She has an unceremonious, almost offhand, way of telling the reader pivotal information, like, "Yes, reader, you read correctly. That happened. Now we're going to deal with it--but not too quickly." It's a deft cadence of storytelling.

I found Certain Women to be heavy reading, also like A Severed Wasp, only this novel felt long to me at points, like during some of the characters' conversations about King David and his family, much of which I didn't particularly enjoy. I've read and heard about these accounts several times before, and I realize the novel wouldn't make sense if the reader didn't know those details of King David's life, but I'm bent toward thinking that actually taking the reader back to those times through the narrator might have been more interesting than having the present characters sit and relay the facts to each other at different times.

"Then King David did this, then he said that. Then what happened?"

"He did something else. Right?"

"Oh, yes, he did that. Then Abigail said this to him."

If I wasn't a read-every-word kind of reader, I might have skipped or skimmed over the fact-giving chats to get back to the story.

Yet, I somehow get the sense that there is something in the essence of this novel that I likely missed, that if I were to reread it ten or twenty years from now, I would catch something in it that I wasn't quite able to put my finger on, this time around. It's an intriguing notion. ( )