The House by the River
In the years before WWII, Theodora and Gerasimos live in a small house by a river, at the foot of Mount Olympus in Greece. Theirs is a simple life: maintaining a vegetable garden, keeping chickens and goats, and working as farmhands. Their five daughters are Melissanthi, Julia, Aspasia, Polyxeni, and Magdalini. The villagers are astonished to see that the girls are among the first to be sent to school. Gerasimos dies during the war, and throughout the German occupation, Theodora manages to survive, keeping herself and her daughters out of harm’s way. One after another, the girls find suitors and leave home, and each time, Theodora is covered in dust from their new husband’s departing vehicle, except in the case of Polyxeni, who runs away with a theater troupe. However, Theodora instills in each daughter a love for their home and the assurance that she’ll be waiting for them. While subsequent chapters narrate the girls’ stories, we long to know if they’ll ever return to the house by the river.
In this poignant chronicle, Lena Manta examines the lives of five individual girls who leave their home. While their departures are typical, the possibility of their return forms the intriguing premise of this novel. Although they each go their separate ways—mostly to other locations in Greece, one to Africa, and another to America—their stories are similar, except perhaps in one instance. Readers wishing to see more variation in the girls’ lives and more interactions in their storylines may be disappointed. Their long absence from home, and the lack of visits to their mother, or her to them, is also puzzling. This book seems to be a collection of stories about the parents and each daughter, with some integration at the end. However, the strong prose and descriptions of Greece and other locales are engrossing.
