Burning Marguerite
At its heart, Burning Marguerite illustrates the truism that a child never realizes that a parent had a life prior to him or her. The book begins with the death of ninety-four-year-old Marguerite Deo. Her adopted son, thirty-four-year-old James Jack, finds her dead in the snow outside her New England island cabin. His response reveals that although he is not her child by blood, he is her child in every way that counts. As James Jack ducks the sheriff, who wants him to report her death, and prepares for the type of leave taking Marguerite would want, the story begins to alternate between James Jack’s present and Marguerite’s past. To James Jack, she has always been Tante, the woman who raised him after his parents drowned while ice fishing. But her early life was far more volatile, taking her from her parents’ farm on the island to a sort of exile in New Orleans between the two world wars and back again to the island after her parents’ death.
Although not a mystery, the story does unfold a piece at a time, in nonlinear fashion, so it is not until the very end that it comes full circle and we see that Marguerite’s life ended so that James’s could begin. Beautifully written, the reader feels the cold of New England and the steaminess of New Orleans, and the bond between Marguerite and James, while not sentimental, is palpable. A haunting read.
