Tag: Hudson River Valley

On my way home from Kentucky over the weekend, I started listening to Carol Goodman’s marvelous The Seduction of Water. The book was too long, however, for me to finish before I pulled up in front of the Lost Apartment Saturday night; I have been known to stay in the car for another fifteen to twenty minutes to finish an audiobook, but when I checked with this one, I still have over an hour left to go. There was no way I was going to sit in the car for another hour with the apartment merely a dozen or so yards away from me, so I unplugged the phone and started unloading the car, figuring I could listen to it on Sunday while doing things. I was exhausted and had too many other things to do that day, so I put it off until the morning of the 4th, when I finished listening while doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen.

And what a marvelous tale it is, indeed.

My favorite story when I was small, the one I begged for night after night, was “The Selkie.”

“That old story,: my mother would say. She’d say it in the exact tone of voice as when my father complimented her dress, Oh, this old thing, she’d say, her pale green eyes giving away her pleasure. “Wouldn’t you rather something new?” And she’d hold up a shiny book my aunt Sophie, my father’s sister, had bought for me. The Bobbsey Twins or, when I was older, Nancy Drew. American stories with an improving message and plucky, intrepid heroines.

“No, I want your story,” I would say. It was her story because she knew it by heart, had heard it from her mother, who had heard it from hers…a line of mothers and daughters that I imagined like the images I had seen when I stood by her side in front of the mirrors in the lobby.

“Well, if it will help you sleep…”

And I would nod, burrowing deeper into the blankets. It was one of the few requests I stuck to, perhaps because my mother’s initial hesitation came to be part of the ritual–part of the telling. A game we played because I knew she liked that I wanted her story, not some store-bought one. Even when she was dressed to go out and she had only come up to say a quick good night she would sit down on the edge of my bed and shrug her coat off her shoulders so that its black fur collar settled down around her waist and I would nestle into its dark, perfumed plush, and she, getting reading to tell her story, would touch the long strands of pearls at her neck, the beads making a soft clicking sound, and close her eyes. I imagined that she closed her eyes because the story was somewhere inside her, on an invisible scroll unfurling behind her eyelids from which she read night after night, every word the same as the night before.

“In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea, in a land between the sun and the moon…”

I’ve always loved the selkie story, myself, and what a marvelous opening this was for the novel!

Our main heroine, Iris Greenfeder, is an ABD (all but dissertation) trying to patch together a living from being an adjunct writing teacher at several different schools. This particular semester, as the book opens, she is also teaching a writing class at Rip Van Winkle Prison. Iris’ mother was a sort of successful fantasy writer who was killed in a fire before she could either write or complete writing the final volume of her trilogy. Iris’ father manages the Hotel Equinox in the Catskills, a luxury resort hotel with stunning views of the Hudson River Valley. Her mother was killed when she was about eleven, and was checked into the dive hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. John McGlynn”–but only her body was found. Was it an affair? Was it something else? This mystery hangs over Iris’ life when the book opens, and her own writing career gets a boost when she sells a story to Caffeine magazine, whose editor kind of pulls Iris back into the orbit of the Equinox Hotel. She lands a top agent who also has more than a passing interest in Iris’ history, and her mother.

She isn’t there long when she realizes that many mysteries shroud not only her own past, but the hotel as well. As she starts trying to figure out her mother–no one believes she was having an affair, despite the police conclusion–and what happened all those years ago, she finds that her mother was also involved in a crime involving some of her friend–the McGlynn, one of whom went to prison and her friend, his sister, threw herself in front of a train after visiting her brother. He was in jail for robbing a hotel, but did he actually do it, or was he framed? Did Iris’ mother know the truth? Slowly but surely Iris starts following the clues and trying to figure out what the truth about her mother was–and there are also people who are looking for that final manuscript of her trilogy. Why? Who cares about an old unpublished manuscript? Iris also is in a long term relationship with an artist that isn’t really giving her what she needs, either–but can she trust the younger, sexy ex-con from her class at the jail that she hires at the Equinox?

This book is classic Goodman; erudite and literary, with ties to writers and the publishing world and legends and fairy tales, all woven together in an enthralling mystery that is very hard to put down.

Definitely another five-star for Carol Goodman!