Every Last Cuckoo- a book review

I love reading a debut novel. This one was worth reading, possessing a surprising assurance for a first try.

Kate Maloy chose to write about the end of life in "Every Last Cuckoo". No, not the act of dying, that's not what I mean. What I mean is that she chose to write about the love between a couple in the twilight of life, in their seventies. Then Charles dies, and Sarah is left behind to find her way, and the story becomes not theirs but rather hers- the tale of a widow who journeys back to the world of life.

She does it paradoxically not by being helped, but by being needed. There is a group of people who come to live with her in her big Vermont farmhouse in the woods. There is Lottie, the granddaughter who can't get along with her parents. There is Josie and her new baby, fleeing an abusive husband. There is Mordechai, a transplanted Israeli writer whose wife and child died tragically. The interactions of the characters are intensely imagined- like the photographs that Sarah starts to take in the woods during the walks she takes to forget her pain and loss.

Life is made of love and loss and memory and none of it is wasted. Maloy show us this thing, rather than just telling us about it. It is to her credit that she tries a hard unknown thing instead of an easy familiar one. Who writes a romance about a 75 year old woman whose husband is gone?  I guess you would call this a "woman's novel", but here is a male who could not put it down.

In parting, I would like also to salute Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Algonquin is an obscure publisher if you are more used to seeing words like Harper or Random on the bestseller list, but Algonquin takes the time to discover and foster new talent, rather than suck the money out of people who have written a couple books and have nothing more to say. Here's to you, Algonquin. You've done it again, amazingly. Yes, I have the advance copy of "Mudbound" by Hillary Jordan. And yes, I will read it.