The Truth of the Matter

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From a National Book Award winner comes a masterful novel set in the 1940s about a woman finding a new life for herself and her grown children after her husband's death.From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Dew returns to the Scofields of Washburn, Ohio, for a minutely observed, lucid and lyrical examination of family ties, the second in a trilogy (The Evidence Against Her). By the early days of WWII, widow Agnes Scofield (her husband, Warren, died in a car accident in 1930) has raised four children. Financially pressed and emotionally repressed, Agnes has learned to rely on her schoolteacher's salary, her lifelong friends Lily and Robert Butler, and her ability to keep her thoughts to herself. The Scofield household is first disrupted when the now adult children leave to join the war effort, and then again when they return with spouses, children and ideas of their own. Dew details inner turmoil with delicacy, wit and precision; she focuses on life's ordinary moments, studying them from various points of view and revealing layers of feeling. A Fourth of July picnic gets rehashed by town gossips; family myths are traced to their unlikely origins. As Washburn's postwar expansion casts the Scofield home into shabby respectability, the Scofields likewise change with the times, and Agnes returns to the Maine vacation house of the first novel to come to terms with truths she has spent a lifetime avoiding, in a moving yet unsentimental culmination to a remarkable personal journey. (Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks MagazineAn old-fashioned novel in the best sense, The Truth of the Matter follows the evolution of a complex woman from wife and mother to independence in the 1940s. Elaborate family ties, centered on Agnes's familiar emotions and changing relationships with her children, form the heart of the novel. But Truth also convincingly juxtaposes the minutiae of daily life against a panorama of wartime America. The novel's unhurried plot concerned a few critics, who cited the first half as limp. Other reviewers compared Agnes's rich characterization to her more stiffly portrayed children. Either way, critics look forward to the third installment of the Scofield family saga.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.