Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: New American Library Fiction
Release Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-451-21160-X
Awards:  
Format Reviewed: Trade Paperback
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Genre: Fiction and Literature - Contemporary - Chick Lit
Reviewed: 2004
Reviewer: Kristin Johnson
Reviewer Notes: Reviewer Kristin Johnson is the author of CHRISTMAS COOKIES ARE FOR GIVING, co-written with Mimi Cummins and ORDINARY MIRACLES: My Incredible Spiritual, Artistic and Scientific Journey, co-written with Sir Rupert A.L. Perrin, M.D.
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Digging Out
By Katherine Leiner


    Alys Davies' soul became buried under tons of coal in a Welsh Three Mile Island-type disaster, a historical event rendered brilliantly in Katherine Leiner's debut novel of love, loss, and going home again.

    Not unlike the hero of "Big Fish," Alys only goes home when her father is on his deathbed. However, unlike the fantastical, trippy forgiving atmosphere of "Big Fish," Alys' homecoming and reunion is complex because of the real layers of her life that she must penetrate. Her return to her Welsh hometown of Aberfan follows on the heels of her husband Marc's death and her discovery that he has an illegitimate daughter by a sensual Brazilian named Gabriella ("My goodness, you're so little. You American women"-a misnomer because Alys is Welsh-"is always so concerned about your weight, no? Why do you all want to be so skinny? No breasts!") Nevertheless, her future is hardly more certain than her past. She must face Evan, the man she abandoned for the United States, and confront at last the complex web of family, duty, love, loyalty, and shame.

    It's no easy task, and Alys seems to have lived a life of denial, at least in pop psychology terms. But the grieving that she experiences over the tearing apart of her family eventually surfaces, layer by layer of loamy Welsh soil, until the hard coal of home truths becomes a diamond of redemption. Leiner's prose sparkles with multiple facets, and her characters are no less dimensional. Marc is not the much-maligned cheating consign-him-to-perdition stale-as-cardboard token male voodoo doll, any more than Evan is the gallant dreamy white knight. Alys' crusading angry brother Parry reminds one of the brothers in THE PRINCE OF TIDES, and her grandmother follows the fine tradition of wise clan crones everywhere, the characters appear as themselves and not as mannequins. Leiner gives them real heartbreak, woes, doubts, anger, joy, and sorrow. In a sense, every character must dig his or her way out of a suffocating grave, and each one finally sees the light of day. Leiner's first book makes us thirsty for more.