The Richest Season
Maryann McFadden
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2006 Aventine Press
ISBN: 1593303823

A lonely corporate wife runs away & her husband looses all that's defined him..

In this debut novel Maryann McFadden paints a vivid & emotional story of three people's journeys at pivotal moments in their lives: Joanna, Paul & Grace -- all of whom have to leave the lives they thought they wanted, only to rediscover a part of themselves they'd all but forgotten.

Joanna has been the perfect corporate wife & mother whose nest not only is empty -- her daughter Sarah is living with an artist in Colorado & her son Timmy is away at college in Montana -- her husband, Paul, has just been rewarded for his long climb to VP-hood & is going to have to relocate, again. She's lost count of the houses they've lived in.

Out running one early spring morning in the New Jersey estate, it's all become too much. She's running on empty. She dreads the thought of moving, she aches with the loss of her children -- her motherhood; she's furious at Paul's eternal absence either at the office or away on those business trips -- so much so that she feels her family has evaporated... & she's got nothing to show for it, nothing to do anymore, & the man she married has vanished.

As she runs the thought keeps coming up -- just run away from it all & go find a life for herself. & so she does, packing some stuff into her Jeep & heading south to a place remembered from one of her family's vacation years ago -- an island on the South Carolina coast.

Settling into a hotel, Joanna scours the town for work, except it's too early in the season & no one's hiring yet. When she answers an ad in the local newspaper, she walks along a deserted beach to a house built on the edge of the land, to find Grace, the elderly woman who's in need of someone to live in the little apartment upstairs & take care of her. Grace also has a secret she's not telling anyone, least of all Joanna.

When Paul finally gets home from the conference that marked the pinnacle of his career, he finds his home empty. Still, he's got to keep his nose to the grindstone -- he's got bills to pay, a son in college & so on & so forth. When he learns, weeks later, where Joanna has gone -- she's been using the credit card -- he drives to Pawley Island to confront her & they meet as angry strangers. As he drives away, Paul feels things can't get any worse... until, quite suddenly with no warning, his company is bought out. Then the inevitable downsizing begins & Paul & his best friend, Ted, are two of the first to get axed. Now he's without a job, a wife or a family... what on earth is he going to do?

The Richest Season is an engrossing read of another type of coming of age, written from three points of view -- Joanna, Grace & Paul -- as each struggles with loss, death, love & their sense of worth, while slowly rediscovering parts of themselves they'd all but forgotten when they'd subsumed themselves in their expectations of how they thought they ought to lead their lives.

A deeply satisfying read, The Richest Season will give reading groups much to think about.
(06/18/06)

Rebecca