Tuesday Review: The First Boy I Loved

The First Boy I Loved

By Cheryl Reavis
Publisher:
Bell Bridge Books
Release Date:
January 16, 2014

 

Since her husband’s death, Gillian Warner has been haunted by a past that refuses to stay buried and secrets that belong to a time in her life before she became a wife, a mother, a grandmother—a past that belongs to a younger Gilly and her first love who died in Vietnam decades ago. When it turns out that her closest friend from her nursing school days is now living in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Gilly plans a month-long visit that she hopes will not only allow her to renew her friendship with June but also come to terms with her guilt and regrets and her “relentless remembering” of Ben Tucker. At the last moment, a separate family crisis gives Gilly a companion on her journey, her fifteen-year-old granddaughter Mae who is heartbroken over the betrayal of her first love.

One of the first people Gilly meets in Vietnam is A. J. Donegan, a Vietnam vet and expatriate who serves as a tour guide for guilty, grieving Americans who come to Vietnam to make peace with their pasts and the losses they cannot forget.  A. J., haunted by his own ghosts, knows that the peace the visitors hope to find will prove elusive. As Mae faces her own losses, A. J. shows Gilly the city as few visitors see it, including but not limited to the sites central to Tucker’s life there, and introduces her to residents who have their own memories and varying responses to the past. An attraction develops between them, but can two people whose pasts still claim them so inescapably find a future together?

In The First Boy I Loved, Cheryl Reavis speaks the language of the heart with grace and truth. She cuts past the differences that separate human beings by age and gender and race and reveals experiences we all share—the loss of innocence, the heartbreak of harsh realities, the regrets that never lose their sting, and the many facets of love that help us to survive and even triumph, scarred though we be by our journeys.

I’ve been a Cheryl Reavis fan for more than twenty years, and I regularly recommend her books to other readers. I was delighted to see a Reavis book I had not read listed in the NetGalley catalog and even more delighted that it lived up to every expectation. This book, more women’s fiction with a strong romantic element, will make you laugh, make you cry, and perhaps make you newly conscious of your own “relentless remembering.” Reavis’s deft hand with characterization is evident in her creation of Gilly and A.J., both of them so real I could almost touch them, but also in a wealth of secondary characters from the achingly adolescent Mae to the faithful friend June to the Vietnamese doctor who treats Mae with skill and compassion despite her dislike for Americans rooted in her father’s death in the American War.

Readers who demand a conventional HEA may not be satisfied with the ending, although I have difficulty imaging a more perfect conclusion than the last line, and the story will likely resonate with particular power for those who are old enough to remember the Vietnam War. But I highly recommend this book for anyone who values emotionally compelling stories and excellent writing.

 

Just seeing a new title from Cheryl Reavis left me with a smile on my face. Who are the authors that evoke that response from you?

Tuesday Review: Promise Me a Rainbow

Promise Me a Rainbow

(Reissue of original published in1990)
By Cheryl Reavis
Publisher: Bell Bridge Books
Release Date: May 21, 2012

Catherine Holben is trying to build a meaningful life for herself in the wake of a divorce from the man who had been not only her husband but also her best friend. She finds consolation in her job teaching prenatal nutrition and early childhood development to a group of unmarried, pregnant teenage girls who have been segregated from the rest of the public school population in a minimally funded classroom. One rainy day as she is returning to her apartment, a sculpture in the window of The Purple Box catches her eye. The piece is an expensive, retired collectible, a gnome mother with her sleeping child at her breast entitled “Daisy and Eric.” Catherine finds it irresistible and, in a rare gesture of indulgence, buys it. The sculpture holds particular poignance for her since her marriage ended because she was unable to become pregnant. Her husband had “wanted children—not adopted children and not borrowed children. His children. He had loved her, and he had left her in spite of it.”

“Daisy and Eric” had been the property of Joseph D’Amaro, a builder and stained glass artist and a widower with three children—Della, 16; Charlie, 15, and Mary Frances, known as Fritz, 7. The building industry in Wilmington, North Carolina, has taken a hard hit, and Joe has been forced to sell the sculpture. Even though he discussed the sale with his children, he failed to realize how attached Fritz is to the figures. Joe and Fritz visit Catherine’s apartment to assure Fritz that Catherine will sell the sculpture back to them if Joe ever has the money. They arrive just as Catherine is angrily ending a meeting with her former husband, who has come to tell her that he is soon to be remarried and he and his pregnant bride hope Catherine will attend the wedding. Clearly it is not the moment for the D’Amaros’ request, and Joe insists they leave.

But Fritz is persistent, and when her father drops her off at home while he returns to complete a job, she slips away without Della and Charlie knowing she’s at home and uses her milk money to catch a bus that will take her back to Catherine’s apartment. Fritz, whose mother died when she was two, explains to Catherine that she “likes things with mothers,” thus her affection for Daisy and Eric. Fritz and Catherine bond over hot chocolate with vanilla ice cream, stories, and their shared fondness for things with mothers, but when Joe comes to retrieve Fritz, he and Catherine clash. Joe is uncomfortable with Fritz’s revelations to Catherine, and Catherine finds Joe stubborn and hot-headed. Even when attraction flares, neither welcomes it. Joe has been slow to recover from the loss of his wife, and Catherine is scarred by the rejection of the man she believed would love her forever. As if their histories were not complications enough, Joe’s predatory sister-in-law and manipulative teenage daughter are determined to separate him from Catherine. Even great sex and a love that neither expected to find may not be enough to overcome all these problems.

Reading Promise Me a Rainbow makes it easy to understand why Cheryl Reavis is a four-time RITA winner. This is an emotionally powerful story about the extraordinariness of ordinary people. Catherine and Joe are likeable, interesting characters. Catherine is a wounded creature struggling to find herself in a world more difficult and lonelier than the one she thought was hers. She must come to terms with Jonathan’s betrayal of their love and her own body’s betrayal in its inability to bear Jonathan’s child. That there is no physiological reason for her barrenness makes the issue even more complex. But despite her pain, she has a vast store of compassion and understanding from which her students, her cancer-stricken friend Pat, and Fritz and Joe benefit.

Joe is a good-looking, hard-working guy with a tender heart and a determination to do the right thing. He wishes life were less complicated than it is, but he does his best with all it throws at him. He feels guilty because he was so immersed in his grief over his wife’s death that he wasn’t the father to Fritz that he wanted to be. His is not a contemplative nature, and he often speaks and acts impulsively. But his love for all three of his children is strong, and once he commits to Catherine his love and need for her are just as powerful.   

Fritz is a delight. A solemn child, older than her years, who sees more than the adults around her are aware of, she feels responsible for the happiness of those she loves. And yet with her love of gummi bears and stories and her need of mothering, she is all-child. Della and Charlie are less fully developed, but Charlie’s charm and nerdiness and Della’s stylishness and attempts to be adult make them credible characters. Even the girls Catherine teaches are individuals presented with humor and heartbreaking vulnerability.

Bell Bridge is making available some of the best romance fiction of past decades to new readers. Cheryl Reavis is a writer of the same high caliber as Jill Barnett and Kathleen Eagle. If you like intelligent stories about characters who are adults with believable pasts and problems and potential, who are driven by emotional needs as much as sexual desire, I highly recommend Promise Me a Rainbow.  

I know some readers don’t like books with kids in them. I do when the kids have a purpose in the story and are real kids who act their age. Cheryl Reavis does a superb job with the kids in this story. Do you like stories with children? What are your favorites?