the love song of miss queenie hennessy review

All the angst and pain of adolescence is sharply drawn as David describes his ambivalent feelings towards his parents: “I look at them, Q. It’s in some ways an abusive co-dependency where David uses Queenie for money and recognition outside of his parents’ realm and Queenie uses David as a touchstone to Harold, the man she loves and cannot be with. Since it exists secretly and outside standard social practices, their friendship isn’t subject to normal rules. David is an eccentric teenager who rebels against mainstream culture and strikes up a strange friendship with Queenie.

This novel also contains one of the most powerful portrayals of a wayward, difficult child that I can remember reading. These characters are vibrantly drawn with the tragic/comic drama of their circumstances forming some brilliant scenes. Queenie spends time in the gardens and recreational room of the hospice with an idiosyncratic group of residents all suffering from different terminal illnesses and the caring distinctive nuns who attend to their welfare.

But this novel stands alone for the sheer power of the hospice scenes portrayed and which are totally separate from Harold’s story.

However, it was both fascinating and touching to revisit this story from another character’s perspective with certain scenes from the first book being told from a different angle. This is not a soft tale of love lost, but a story of raw powerful emotion that realistically captures the things that are most joyful and excruciating about life.Īuthor Rachel Joyce has described this novel as a “companion” to her debut novel “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.” I loved this first novel which contained a meditative journey following Harold across England to visit Queenie, but it’s been a couple of years since I read it so the story hovers dimly at the back of my head. Slowly the past between them is uncovered along with the complicated relationship Queenie had with Harold’s son David. This provokes her to write back to him pages and pages with the assistance of one of the caring attendant nuns. After sending him a short letter informing him of how little time she has left, postcards begin arriving from Harold who tells her to wait for him as he’s walking across all of England to come to see her again. She is, as she puts it, quite literally “words without a mouth.” She lives in a hospice sifting through memories, remembering Harold, the great love of her life who never even knew she loved him, and waiting for the inevitable. Queenie is a woman late in life suffering from a terminal cancer that has left her disfigured with part of her jaw missing. Whether it’s a brief glimpse of someone you admire and want to be or a longstanding passion for someone or something beyond your reach, there are always alternative choices to contemplate and brood upon. Sometimes it feels like most of life is spent imagining parallel lives in the mind.

The love song of miss queenie hennessy review