This started out strong and then petered out for me. Too long! And I found that I was losing interest. Here is a review:
This long-winded debut saga takes place over three decades in the life
of a writer. By age 13, Joan Ashby, a writer to her core, has vowed
never to allow marriage or offspring to get in the way of her authorial
life. By her early 20s she has published two dark, prize-winning short
story collections. Beautiful and poised, Joan travels the world on book
tours and the literary world awaits with bated breath her first novel.
But she falls for a brilliant, dashing young eye doctor, marries him,
and her plans change. Their beloved son, Daniel, is Joan's doppelganger
and loves the written word from an early age, but she never lets on to
him that she is a famous writer. As Daniel grows, Joan writes stories,
which she reads to him, and also novels, which she keeps secret from
both her son and her husband, believing she must keep this self separate
from her self as mother and wife. Eventually, she has another son and
decides not to publish the novel she has secretly completed, because she
believes she must devote her time to keeping her troubled but brilliant
second son from the brink of despair. In the meantime, Daniel discovers
his mother is an author. Joan finally flees to Dharamsala for 200 pages
of meditation, recovering her identity, forgiving her son, falling in
love again, coming to terms with her marriage-and writing another novel.
The novel, in addition to overextending itself-both in scope and actual
page count-is frustrating, shallowly addressing its central theme of
artistic pursuit versus family, and eventually turns into more of an
inspirational primer on Buddhism than character study.
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