Review: Evelyn Jane and Angus
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 19, 2011
I must admit that I ordered My Mother's Lover for two reasons, the inexpensive price and the fact that it was a Kindle Single, an ebook. Oh, and the title grabbed me too. I was quite pleased with the selection on all counts, and I found it to be an engaging, well-researched, heart-touching story. The black and white photographs added a certain poignancy too.The book, more like a long story, begins with a man scattering his mother's ashes in the Pacific Ocean, a request that she made of her children shortly before her death. Separated by Angus's death at an earlier decade of her life, the author's mother deeply desired that they be together in death. Ironically, the children learn much later that Angus's remains were actually interred in California, not off the coast of Hawaii.At some point, I realized that the book was true, that these people had really lived and loved and had families of their own. The author's mother went to medical school after Angus's death and met her future husband there. Unfortunately, he could never slay the ghost of Angus (a.k.a. Norman), and the couple divorced after 17 years. The author, David Dobbs,learns the details of the affair and its major players from Angus's children, David and Christy. Things were complicated in Angus's life; he was married to Luella and had two young children. Trying to do what he perceived to be the right thing, he asked Luella for a divorce that would free him to marry Evelyn Jane. Wisely thinking of her future and that of her children, Luella refused.Although the story might seem a little bizarre and farfetched, I think similar scenes were played out all during WW II as unlikely folks were thrown together for a limited period of time and then pulled apart by world and life events. It makes the reader wonder just how many other people have stories like this one, beautiful and tragic at the same time.