Thhe Widow's Season

Book No: 49
Title: The Widow’s Season
Author: Laurie Brodie
Genre: Fiction
Completed: 9/7/09
No. of Pages: 303
Rating: 3/5*****

The premise of this book sounded very promising, a young widow whose husband is presumed dead after a kayaking accident, however his body has never been found. Three months later Sarah suddenly begins to see David everywhere. Is her husband dead? Is Sarah having a mental breakdown? Is she being haunted by a ghost? The answer to this mystery was pretty predictable and not at all surprising. Throw in the fact that I actually disliked Sarah, the protagonist of this story and you have the makings for a run of the mill story.

At first I understood a lot of the inertia and apathy Sarah has as a reaction to her husband’s death and part of her grief process. After a while I began to see that this was the way she was about everything- never taking the initiative and seeming to just do whatever is expected of her or never reacting to events around her. I found her constant analyzing and complaining about her marriage contradictory to her reactions to the apparent reappearance of her husband. I also greatly disliked the turn her relationship with her brother-in-law takes. In fact the only person I liked in this book was Sarah’s calm and competent neighbor Margaret. The revelation of what was going on was pretty ho-hum and not at all surprising, and contrary to a number of the blurbs on the cover I did not find this story haunting at all. I was hoping for a great mystery or a paranormal story and got neither, just a mediocre story that ended up disappointing.