At some stage in their lives (sooner for some than for
others), most people will reflect upon how differently things might have turned
out if they had only made one or two early decisions differently. It is, after all, the decisions one makes
while still too young to understand their real impact that often set the tone
for the rest of one’s life. Choices of
mates and career paths are as often backed into because they represent the
“path of least resistance” as because they have been carefully and reasonably
considered.
The “swerve” in Judith Whitman’s life did not happen until
she was in her mid-forties. Judith may
not have been particularly excited about her life in California with her banker
husband, teen-age daughter, and film editing job, but she had to admit to
herself that it was a secure and comfortable one. It is only when she loses the key that opens
her newly rented storage garage, that her life swerves off its beaten path onto
one much more dangerous – a path that runs all the way back to Nebraska and the
man she jilted so many years earlier.
Judith was fifteen when she met Willy Blunt, a young
carpenter already in his early twenties.
When it happened, her parents were living apart and Judith was spending
the summer in Rufus Sage, Nebraska, with her father while her mother got on
with her own life back in central Vermont.
Two years later, she would return to Rufus Sage to live with her father
and finish high school. From the moment
they met, it seemed inevitable that Willy Blunt and Judith Whitman would be
together and, by the time she left Nebraska for a prestigious California
university education, the two were engaged.
Tom McNeal |
She would, however, not see Willy again for more than a
quarter of a century.
Tom McNeal begins Judith’s story in the present, but uses a
series of lengthy flashbacks to capture the essence of the more innocent high
school girl who fell in love with a man and a lifestyle she would ultimately
reject in favor of the more sophisticated one offered by southern California. McNeal has created an interesting character
in Judith Whitman, but it is the Willy Blunt character that will likely be the
favorite of most readers. Blunt is one
of those all-American country boys who seem to catch the eye of every girl who
sees him while, at the same time, earning the good-natured respect and envy of
all of his male peers. Their story,
together and apart, is an intriguing one that will have most readers rushing
toward the book’s rather surprising ending.
Rated at: 4.0
(Review Copy provided by Publisher)