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Summary
Summary
From Gail Godwin, three-time National Book Award finalist and acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Evensong and The Finishing School, comes a sweeping new novel of friendship, loyalty, rivalries, redemption, and memory. It is the fall of 1951 at Mount St. Gabriel's, an all-girls school tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina. Tildy Stratton, the undisputed queen bee of her class, befriends Chloe Starnes, a new student recently orphaned by the untimely and mysterious death of her mother. Their friendship fills a void for both girls but also sets in motion a chain of events that will profoundly affect the course of many lives, including the girls' young teacher and the school's matriarch, Mother Suzanne Ravenel. Fifty years on, the headmistress relives one pivotal night, trying to reconcile past and present, reaching back even further to her own senior year at the school, where the roots of a tragedy are buried. In Unfinished Desires, a beloved author delivers a gorgeous new novel in which thwarted desires are passed on for generations and captures the rare moment when a soul breaks free.
Author Notes
Gail Godwin was born on June 18, 1937, in Birmingham, Ala. and graduated from the University of North Carolina and University of Iowa. Godwin writes about strong women, a perspective she gathered from her own life. After her father abandoned her at an early age, she was raised by her mother and grandmother. Her father eventually returned on the day of her high school graduation and she lived with him for a brief period before he ultimately shot and killed himself.
Godwin worked as a reporter for The Miami Herald, and later as a travel consultant before achieving her fame as a writer. Godwin's novels are about contemporary women, frequently Southern, who search for meaning in their lives. In Glass People, the heroine is a beautiful woman who learns that her husband is merely obsessed with her beauty and unconcerned about her as a person. Other popular titles include The Odd Woman and The Good Husband. Godwin has been the recipient of several honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestselling author Godwin (Evensong; The Finishing School) brings readers back in time to the early 1950s in this endearing story of Catholic school girls and the nuns who oversee them. As Mother Suzanne Ravenel begins a memoir of her 60-plus years at Mount St. Gabriel's School in Mountain City, N.C., she's forced to re-examine the "toxic year" of 1951-1952, one of her worst at the school-beginning with the arrival of ninth-grade student Chloe Starnes, who's recently lost her mother, and Mother Malloy, a beautiful young nun assigned to the freshman class. Starnes and Malloy's arrivals presage a shift in the ranks of freshman Tildy Stratton's cruel clique, with significant consequences for all involved. Change, when it finally comes, stems from the girls' attempt to revive a play written years before by Ravenel. Godwin captures brilliantly the subtleties of friendships between teenage girls, their ambivalence toward religion and their momentous struggle to define people-especially themselves. Poignant and transporting, this faux memoir makes a convincing, satisfying novel. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
After a couple of subpar efforts, Godwin (Queen of the Underworld, 2006, etc.) is back in top form with a gripping tale of jealousies and power struggles at a Catholic girls' school. In the year 2001, elderly Mother Suzanne Ravenel tape-records her memories of her 50 years at Mount Saint Gabriel's in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. Her worst memories are of the dreadful school year 1951-52, when a turbulent ninth grader provoked an outburst that resulted in the headmistress being sent on a leave of absence. Mother Ravenel's own student years at Mount Saint Gabriel's in the 1930s also figure in the story, as does her fraught friendship with Antonia Tilden. This being the South, the separate generations are connected by blood and grievances. Antonia's orphaned niece Chloe is in that 1951-52 ninth-grade class, and she becomes best friends with manipulative, needy Tildy Stratton, daughter of Antonia's embittered twin Cordelia, who's convinced that Suzanne Ravenel's pushiness led to Antonia abandoning her true vocation as a nun. Cordelia's animosity and malice drive the plot, as Tildy takes up her mother's vendetta against the admittedly bossy, self-righteous Mother Ravenel. Chloe's kind Uncle Henry is the only male character of any significance; the emphasis is on female friendships, especially the adolescent variety, with its gusts of hormonal emotions and intricate maneuvers for position. Bad mothers get a good deal of attention as well (there are quite a few of them), and Godwin elicits our understanding for all her characters without letting them off the hook for bad behavior. She skillfully unfolds fascinatingly tangled motives as she keeps the action bustling along. Moving final scenes show an old nun realizing that mixed motives matter less than a lifetime of service, and two old friends reconnecting after 55 years, matured and seasoned by what they've endured, but not so very different from what they were at 14. A strong story populated by a host of memorable characterssmart, satisfying fiction, one of the author's best in years. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Madeline describes Mount St. Gabriel's, the venerated all-girls Catholic school in Mountain City, North Carolina, as a hotbed of bitchery. Self-possessed and beautiful at 16, Madeline had followed her sharp-tongued photographer mother, Cornelia, and her mother's twin, Antonia, to Mount St. Gabriel's, only to be expelled. Now Madeline's scheming younger sister, Tildy, is equally in danger of triggering the wrath of the school's flinty headmistress, Mother Raving Ravenel. There's a reason for Ravenel's hostility toward the family, but before Godwin reveals that secret, there are many other intriguing entanglements, conflicts, and tragedies to sort out, and readers will be in no rush. Godwin's scintillating thirteenth novel is a perfect take-a-break tale. Delectably funny, shrewdly melodramatic, and complexly spiritual, it takes place in two time frames. The stories of Madeline and classmates Tildy, wild Maud, and Chloe, a budding artist mourning her mother, take place in 1951. In 2001, Mother Ravenel, still fierce at 85, is recording her memories of Mount St. Gabriel's,and struggling with the resurrection of long-suppressed feelings. With a viney plot, smart and sensitive characters, and elegantly witty dialogue, Godwin's novel is as refreshing as just-picked berries.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GIRLS, girls, girls. As any observer of playground politics can tell you, the dynamics in groups of girls are awe-inspiring, if not a little frightening. Their social drive can be intense, heady with love and aggression. Add God to the mix and the combustion reverberates through the heavenly choirs. Gail Godwin's reserved yet powerful new novel, "Unfinished Desires," is set in a Roman Catholic boarding school in the mountains of North Carolina. The school, Mount St. Gabriel's, is led by the indomitable Mother Ravenel, herself once a student there, when she was the ringleader of a secretive clique of girls, the "oblates of the Red Nun." With the exception of one terrible year of mysterious seclusion, God has been at Ravenel's side throughout her life's work of running Mount St. Gabriel's - selecting students and hiring teachers, raising funds, overseeing a grand expansion of the grounds. She maintains a steady patter of conversation with Him. "It's a man's voice," she tells her retreat master. "And it's wise. He comes up with things I wouldn't have thought of." Mother Ravenel is described by her charges as "old Ravenous" or "Raving Ravenel," and with good reason; she has a lifelong habit of confusing her authority with divine right. The voice of the Lord reassures her: "For the most part, your ambition has served us well. It has produced many good results, but it has chipped away some of your soul." Though it's a beautiful, well-intentioned institution, the school is anything but serene. "This place is such a hotbed of bitchery," says a student. "Generations of bitchery and intrigue!" The novel opens with a retired and nearly blind Suzanne Ravenel, now in her 80s, attempting to record an official history of Mount St. Gabriel's. She wants, as well, to make her heart whole. She is haunted by what she calls the "toxic year," 1951, when "the poisonous elements convened" in a class of ninth graders. It is a year, she concludes, that is "better forgotten," and yet it intrudes persistently on her thoughts. The novel switches back and forth between Ravenel's dryly official, sanctified version of events - a history of insufferably superior "furnished souls," as E. E. Cummings put it - and the richer, darker, uninhibited story of actual life among these manipulative, ambitious, gifted, fascinating adolescent girls. In what one of the teachers calls their "molting age," the ninth graders resist authority, adore their friends and insist, as teenagers will, on bringing the secrets of their elders to light - no matter what the cost. Ravenel's secret is only one of several "unfinished desires" that snag and tangle the characters' lives, giving the novel its momentum. Godwin has created several deeply affecting characters. Bold, imaginative, acerbic and funny Tildy is a ringleader who has learned from her mother, Cornelia, how to "dry ice" her friends with caustic comments. As Ravenel tells a new teacher, the angelic Mother Malloy, "Your rising ninth grade has made the critique of others into a high form of torture." Cornelia and her twin sister, Antonia, who died in an accident on her honeymoon in Rome, had been Ravenel's classmates at Mount St. Gabriel's, and their friendship was as passionately compacted as those of the next generation. The school had offered the young Ravenel an escape from a dreadful mother, who told her she was "sneaky, sanctimonious, self-advancing." At school, she felt liberated: "I had been given a chance to start over and win love for myself." As a student, and then as a nun and a teacher, she has been deliberate and successful. Yet even in old age she can't shake a repeated dream - or is it a memory? - of a rapturous kiss, "my peak moment of fulfillment," with Antonia. "Then comes the bad part: waking inside this old body still throbbing guiltily with satisfaction." Tildy's best friend since third grade, "her Magnanimous Experiment," is Maud Norton, whose home life is "an embarrassment to her ideals." Tildy has rescued Maud and made her a new person, "practically created from scratch." But when Maud unceremoniously dumps her, Tildy takes on a new project in gentle Chloe, whose own mother has recently died. Chloe is a marvelous creation. She appears mousy but is quietly, determinedly, profoundly strange. In her grief, she conjures up scenes of her mother, Agnes, in purgatory - "an extension of life's imperfections, Agnes had said. You stopped in purgatory because you weren't yet prepared for perfection." Mother and daughter had been the closest of friends. Chloe had supported Agnes through the death of Chloe's beloved father and, later, through Agnes's abusive second marriage. As Chloe understands it, "Agnes's soul would be going through the motions until she got it right, until she understood what she had done and what she had left undone." Chloe is a gifted artist, able to capture, with quick strokes of her pencil, the essential gestures of those around her. And as she draws page upon page of portraits of her mother "in favorite remembered poses," she is even able to imagine herself into her mother's own childhood. A loyal daughter whose love is truly boundless, Chloe becomes her mother's "guardian angel," making a radical decision to help her mother's soul move on to heaven. When Chloe's stepfather surfaces to reclaim her, insisting she leave the school and come to live with him and his new wife, the grownups tiptoe around with lawyers. But Chloe, in a memorable and shocking scene, goes to his home and bravely confronts him. Politely devastating, Chloe is the embodiment of one of Godwin's major themes, the idea of "holy daring," of action that "lets itself be guided by divine improvisation." Godwin is adept with the telling stroke: the plangent peal of the bells marking the rituals of the day; the adolescent paper called "The Pungent Ache of the Soul in 'David Copperfield'"; a letter written in Mother Malloy's "exquisite nun cursive"; the "squashed clumps of hair" under a nun's veil; the veil itself, folded and laid in a drawer, "the two straight pins arranged on top of the black square of georgette crepe in the form of a cross." The novel's other large theme, played out in almost every major character, is the admonition raised on the first page: "What did you love most? And what have you left undone?" Much has been left undone, and by the end of this tale even more has come undone. Why should life in a boarding school be different from life anywhere else? Mothers lose track of daughters; best friends brutally part company; marriages are rent asunder. It gives nothing away to mention one among several final images. More than 50 years after that "toxic year," a reclusive Chloe is hauling stones to build what she calls her Chapel of Secrets - a place where she can "keep company with the people she loved, who continued to live in her and through her. Here also, in the silence of her country thoughts, she could continue to work on whatever in her was hers alone to complete." We can only hope that those who love us best in this life will be similarly devoted, shepherding us past all we will inevitably leave undone. As Godwin's novel reminds us, no desire is ever finished. Dominique Browning's new memoir, "Slow Love," will be published this spring. The ninth-grade girls in Godwin's novel have 'made the critique of others into a high form of torture.'
Library Journal Review
Godwin's latest novel (after Queen of the Underworld) is a convoluted tale of intrigue at a girls' boarding school that spans generations. Mount St. Gabriel, an exclusive academy in the North Carolina mountains, was founded by two nuns at the beginning of the 20th century. The school's sheltered atmosphere promoted rigorous academic and religious education but allowed adolescent jealousies to fester unchecked. The story's major characters attended the school in the early 1950s, when the school's headmistress was the manipulative Mother Ravenel, herself an alumna from the 1920s, as were some of the students' mothers. The story hopscotches in time from the school's founding to the near present, when the elderly Mother Ravenel dictates her memoir and aging classmates reunite to reminisce. It's a chore to keep the many generations of characters straight, especially when so many are superficially drawn. The promise of uncovering Mother Ravenel's involvement in a past incident of seeming import to one of the families lures the reader on, but the denouement, though tragic, reveals little motivation beyond schoolgirl pettiness. Verdict Of interest to die-hard Godwin fans.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One Tour of the Grounds Third Saturday in August 1951 Mount St. Gabriel's Mountain City, North Carolina "When you've done as much girl-watching as I have, Mother Malloy, you can see even as they're coming up through the lower grades how each class reveals itself as an organism in its own right. You're not too tired for a bit of a ramble, I hope." "Not at all, Mother Ravenel. I've only been sitting on trains for two days." "Good, in that case"--the headmistress, as quick of step as she was in speech, veered suddenly off the gravel walk and, snatching up her ankle-length skirts, plunged down a woodland path--"we'll take a turn around the new athletic field and then go up to the grotto and sit with the Red Nun awhile and have a little prayer to Our Lady in front of our Della Robbia." "Who is the Red Nun?" Without slowing her pace, the headmistress turned back to reward the new young teacher with an appreciative smile. "You know, I often still catch myself thinking of her as a 'who.' After all these years! The shortest way to put it is, she's our mascot. If you can rightly call a six-foot-high ton of red marble a mascot. She's been unfinished since the middle of the First World War. It's quite a story, and you know what? I'm going to save it until we're at the grotto. There are so many things I want to point out to you first. Now, where was I?" "You were saying about--organisms?" "Oh, yes. A class is never just a collection of individual girls, though it is certainly that , too, when you're considering one girl at a time. But a class as a whole develops a group consciousness. It's an organic unit, with its own special properties. While we're having our walk, I will tell you a little about your ninth-grade girls, the upcoming freshman class. They are a challenging group, those girls. They will require control." "As a--an organism, you mean? Or--some ones in particular?" "Both, Mother Malloy." In the presence of the headmistress, Mother Malloy, who was by habit cool and exact in speech, found herself stumbling and blurting. From my responses so far, she thought, this voluble, assured woman must be wondering how I am going to take charge of any class, not to mention a "challenging" one that requires "control." Mother Malloy was vexed by the clumsiness that had come over her even as she had been descending the steps of the train, taking caution with her long skirts, thanking the conductor who steadied her by the elbow, when a nun wearing aviator's sunglasses shot forward to claim her. Mother Ravenel was a vigorously handsome woman of medium height, with a high-colored face and fine white teeth. Snappy phrases, bathed in southern drawl, assailed the young nun from Boston. Her hand was clapped firmly between Mother Ravenel's immaculately gloved ones and she was mortified that she had not remembered to put on her own gloves. There was worse to come. Mother Ravenel introduced her uniformed Negro driver and a lighter-skinned young man: "This is Jovan--we call him our Angel of Transportation--and this is his grandson Mark, who will be going off to college next year." Mother Malloy extended her hand first to gray-haired Jovan, who took it after the merest hesitation. Though sensing she had done something outside of protocol, she had no choice but to repeat the gesture to young Mark, who, after a quick glance at his grandfather, shook her hand and bolted away to see to her trunk. While the two men loaded it into the back of the wood-paneled station wagon bearing the Mount St. Gabriel's Excerpted from Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.