Part One of this ingenious plot is narrated in the first person singular by Rosie, a 17 year-old suddenly orphaned Sonoma County, California girl who, in 1938 is down on her luck. Her synesthesia (she sees certain sounds as different colours) is mistaken for hallucinations from psychosis and after a single drunken sexual encounter she is pregnant. The father of the child is not revealed to the reader until past page 100 and then is it is a shocking surprise. Sent to a locked home for unwed mothers, the insane, and psychopaths, she plots escape but is delivered of a baby who is immediately taken away from her. Several girls are forced to undergo secret salpingectomies to sterilize them at the peak of the entirely legal eugenics movement. She overhears that she is to be sterilized two days postpartum. I won’t spoil the suspense for the readers by revealing the subsequent turbulent and then very successful fulfilling, happy, married course of her life, but she becomes convinced, for a time, that her unusually severe synesthesia (she sees colours in response to names and places as well as to sounds) is a true disability that makes her unfit to reproduce.
A gift of an amaryllis bulb from the narrator of Part Two, which is discarded by her keepers, features prominently as it comes to aptly symbolize wasted years of her life because it fails to bloom annually, and Amaryllis is the name she requests the adoption agency to give her daughter.
Part Two is narrated by Helen, a single expat American relative of Rosie’s first keepers after she was orphaned. She works as a nannie in various European countries and is the one who gave her the amaryllis bulb. She flees from Nazi-controlled Vienna during the war to Lucerne smuggling disabled children across the border with her, and then she returns to a very different California to the one she left. In Vienna she had witnessed the Nazi eugenics sterilization of “undesirables” that preceded the mass extermination of them, and Jews in particular. Her life story is as complicated as that of Rosie’s but entirely different and, of course, their lives are interconnected.
I have long thought that both synesthesia and eugenics would be great features to build a novel around, and here it is, in imaginative, integrated, glorious detail. Synesthesia, present in 2-4 % of the population is still often confused with mental illness and psychosis in particular. Some synesthetics experience sounds as tastes or smells and some with mild forms of it do not even recognize it as unusual. Others hide it, viewing it as a disability. But it can also be seen as a partially genetically endowed artistic gift that boosts the imagination of artistic types, particularly writers. Readers may reasonably suspect that the author is endowed with it.
The eugenics movement that began in the 1910s and persisted until at least the 1960s is just a precursor to more radical Nazi-style policies about how to treat the unfortunate among us. The California’s eugenics laws were not repealed until 1979. In Canada, both Alberta and British Columbia had eugenics laws from the 1930s to the 1970s and some view modern fetal screening for genetic diseases and gene editing science as “positive eugenics.” Although now illegal it still informs the outlook of many racist politicians like Donald Trump.
I usually dislike time shift as an artificial literary device to maintain suspense in thrillers, but here it is used appropriately to maintain curiosity about the course of the lives of the two narrators. The other characters are numerous but unforgettable and not hard to keep straight. There is enough heartbreaking tragedy to make the most stoic reader blubber, but also wonderful life-affirming courage and determination to lift the spirits of the depressed. The dramatic ending is worth waiting for and although the general details of that ending are somewhat predicable, how the details unfold to get there are not.
One memorable quote: “People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust they cannot love.”
I cannot praise this novel enough. Absolutely unforgettable and highly recommended.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thanks, Book Browse.
The Passionate Reader 