The Lavender Hour: A Novel
LeClaire's eighth novel (Entering Normal;Leaving Eden) centers on troubled Jessie Long, a cancer survivor who has passed the crucial five-year all-clear mark. Still unsettled and unattached at 32 with a self-proclaimed habit of looking for love in the wrong places, Jessie moves to her family's empty cottage on Cape Cod where she hopes to find some equilibrium while indulging in her side business—making jewelry. In the first of a series of increasingly destructive decisions, Jessie hides her medical history and volunteers to be a hospice worker. She is assigned to Luke Ryder, a 45-year-old commercial fisherman in the last stages of pancreatic cancer. Jessie falls in love before she ever meets with Luke, on the basis of a few candid photos, and as her need for love grows stronger and clouds her judgments, Luke inches ever closer to death. After Luke dies of a painkiller overdose, Jessie is hauled into court to face charges of assisting in his suicide. LeClaire might have brought some insight and complexity to her narrative during the trial, but instead it putters along. Jessie's epilogue epiphany, similarly, fails to convince.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.