"Emotional and Absorbing"

Grace and Melanie had an extremely bleak childhood. They were not mistreated; they were simply ignored by their mother and father. If it wasn't for the housekeeper, Jemma, they don't know what they would have done. Jemma has always tried to protect them from their parents' indifference.

Melanie is happily married with two children but Grace seems to have married someone very like her father. He is very cold and unsupportive. She does have a good relationship with her daughter, Kate. Their father has been getting more and more senile so it wasn't too surprising when they found their parents dead. They had committed suicide together. The sisters try to make sense of it all but have never understood why or how their parents could be so uncaring. Grace is surprised to find that her parents have left her a home in the resort area of Sabbath Landing. Melanie is fortunate to have the support of her husband but Grace has no one to turn to. Her husband and daughter leave for Aspen but Grace decides to stay home and try to come to terms with what has happened. She reflects on her childhood and her life.

Ever since Grace can remember, she has had terrible dreams of drowning. She is deathly afraid of water. On the spur of the moment she decides to go to Sabbath Landing. She meets Luke and is immediately drawn to him. Memories begin to surface as Grace finally discovers what happened in her childhood and by finding her past, she can look toward a brighter future.

The first several chapters of THE PUZZLE BARK TREE are quite depressing as the reader feels the pain of the two sisters and their equally unhappy parents. The puzzle is what happened to cause the unhappiness and lack of any love in the household. Her parents finally become three dimensional as their story is revealed. Stephanie Gertler gets the message across to the reader with excellent writing and good pacing. There is a lot of emotion and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between the sisters. Luke is such a marvelous hero that you feel the rightness between him and Grace. Of course, there are impediments to their relationship. Ms. Gertler's writing is fresh and this offering is as absorbing as her previous novel, JIMMY'S GIRL. THE PUZZLE BARK TREE has a very touching ending and is a book that I hated to see end.

Reviewed by Marilyn Heyman
Posted June 8, 2002

Summary

Grace Hammond Barnett grew up in the emotionally desolate company of the strangers who were her mother and father. Her only happy memories are of the times spent with her younger sister, Melanie, and Jemma, the warm-hearted family housekeeper who helped fill the void left by Grace's detached, inaccessible parents. Now a mother herself, Grace feels trapped in a sterile marriage to a prominent surgeon and haunted by the recurrent dreams of drowning. Her only anchor is her cherished daughter, Kate. In the aftermath of her parents' sudden double suicide-a tragedy that leaves Grace, Melanie, and Jemma reeling-Grace is bequeathed a house she never knew existed. Leaving her penthouse in Manhattan on New Year's Eve, she travels alone to Sabbath Landing, New York, to a log cabin house on Canterbury Island, surrounded by Diamond Lake. Here, Grace meets Luke Keegan, a local fishing guide whose family history is inextricably bound to hers...and to a devastating secret buried in the cloudy memory of childhood. With compassion and elegance, Stephanie Gertler crafts an emotionally rich story of what it means to survive and thrive against all odds. Like its intricate, interlocking pieces that branch out to shape lives, The Puzzle Bark Tree plumbs the mysteries of the people we can never truly know...of the incomplete memories we carry with us, and the love that can make us whole.