The Goodbye Season (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Goodbye Season Elizabeth Bush Hale, Marian. The Goodbye Season. Holt, 2009 [288p]. ISBN 978-0-8050-8855-7 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 6–9 When crop failure hits the Kaplan farm in 1918 Texas, teenaged daughter Mercy must go to work for a pair of elderly neighbors while her father heads out of state to look for temporary employment. The economic situation may be bleak, but Mercy, who has ambitions beyond her mother’s lot of household and family, is destined to learn that being short of funds can be the least of one’s worries. Influenza strikes her employers and their hired hands, and Mercy is sent back home, only to find that [End Page 247] her mother and siblings have also succumbed to the disease. Forced to find work in a town with little opportunity, she settles for a position as household helper to widow Cora Wilder, who has a stepson, Daniel, near Mercy’s age, two little children, and a dark secret that sends her into sporadic fits of mental imbalance. When Mrs. Wilder’s father shows up for a visit, his daughter’s terror is so overpowering that Mercy and Daniel struggle to uncover the family history that ultimately leads to a tragic showdown between father and daughter. Hale works several strong plot lines—the 1918 influenza, a murder mystery, and a romance between Mercy and Daniel—with mixed success. The devastation wrought upon the small community by the pandemic is compellingly drawn, and Mercy’s plight is heartbreaking and thoroughly believable. Her arrival in the midst of the Wilder saga, however, smacks of contrived melodrama, although readers of a tender disposition will undoubtedly applaud the promise of happily ever after for Mercy and Daniel. Strained plotting aside, it’s refreshing to find a historical fiction heroine who is not remarkable for feistiness and pluck but for her dogged determination to weather hardships and scratch out a modest but contented future for herself. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois