“Bonaventure didn’t know what to do with all that loss.” – Rita Leganski, The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow
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It’s fun to have the opportunity to read a book before its release. Recently I was lucky enough to be asked to participate in a blog tour for Rita Leganski’s debut novel The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow. Along with my review posted below, I had the opportunity to host a Q & A with the author, which you can read here later today. I didn’t know anything about the book, but loved the title, so I checked out the Harper Collins website to find out more. I knew right away that I wanted to participate – a new author, an imaginative story, and a free book – what’s not to love? You can click on the Blog Tour button in the sidebar to check out more about the novel and the other bloggers on the tour.
Because I am terrible at summarizing plots, here’s the summary of The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow from the publisher:
Bonaventure Arrow didn’t make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. But he was listening, placing sound inside quiet and gaining his bearings. By the time he turns five, he can hear flowers grow, a thousand shades of blue, and the miniature tempests that rage inside raindrops. He also hears the voice of his dead father, William Arrow, mysteriously murdered by a man known only as the Wanderer.
Exploring family relics, he opens doors to the past and finds the key to a web of secrets that both hold his family together, and threaten to tear them apart.
Bonaventure’s unusual and otherworldy gift is what draws you into the story, but it is the people around him and the secrets of the past that keep you there. His mother, Dancy, is chained to the past by the loss of her young husband. His paternal grandmother, Letice, has a secret that is only hinted at. In her guilt she has turned to religion and “the joy of deprivation and the comforts of sackcloth.” His maternal grandmother, Adelaide, cares only for social status and is “purely in love with anything that made her sound biblical.” Into their lives comes Trinidad Prefontaine, a hoodoo practitioner with a generous heart and gift of premonition. Bonaventure’s dead father, William, continues to hang around the house, visiting from “Almost Heaven”, unable to let go of his love for his wife and son. And then there is the “Wanderer”, a mysterious stranger whose inarticulate rage seems to hold all the pain of Dancy’s and Letice’s anger and loss.
Bonaventure is the quiet repository for everything unspoken in the lives of the important adults around him. His extraordinary hearing is like the heightened sensitivity of children who grow up in homes full of conflict and family secrets. It makes him supernatural, saintly, and larger than life in a kind of “Owen Meany” way. Where Owen was all capital letters and shouting, Bonaventure is the opposite, silencing his voice and listening so that he can give Dancy and Letice the opportunity for their truest selves to finally speak.
All this is set against the backdrop of the American South in the 1950s, a rich blend of folk beliefs, magic, and religion at a transitional time when women’s lives were emerging from traditional roles to the potential for more freedom. Magic and spirituality play a huge part in the novel, but it is the choices that Dancy, Letice, and Adelaide make in the face of circumstance that define their place in the moral universe. Ultimately, each must find a way to accept and forgive to be freed from the past.
The narrative voice establishes the reader in a dreamlike past. At first I found the style intruding on the story; the language ranges from lyrical description to a folksy vernacular which feels overplayed at times. But as the drama of the story picked up, the narrative voice moved smoothly between the inner and outer lives of each character, a sympathetic witness of events both past and present.
Around the silence of Bonaventure swirl the inner demons of Dancy, Letice, William, and the Wanderer. As he matures he is able to hear their pain more clearly, and eventually secrets are revealed and lives changed.
The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow is an assured first novel. Fans of A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Lovely Bones will enjoy its blend of unusual characters, mystery, magic and emotion. Be sure to click on the link in the sidebar to read more. And come back here later to read my Q & A with author Rita Leganski. I’ll be giving away a copy of the book – stay tuned to Your Hidden Shelf on Facebook for details!