Inness-Brown, Elizabeth. Burning Marguerite: a Novel. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Reason read: part of Burning Marguerite takes place in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in the month of August.
Marguerite Ann Bernadette-Marie Deo, otherwise known as Tante, has passed away. Burning Marguerite starts with James Jack’s third person perspective, and at first, you think it’s going to be his story. However, Marguerite, in her own voice, tells the genesis of her nearly one hundred years and how the orphan James Jack came into her life. The reader gets to know Tante more James, which, in my opinion, is a missed opportunity. James Jack is a character ripe for exploration. As it stands, he is a thirty-plus-year-old man who has never strayed too far from his sheltered island home somewhere in Vermont. He rarely has romantic relationships. The reader does not hear of friendships. His only mission is to take care of Tante. She is all he has ever known since his parents died in a tragic accident when he was just a baby. Meanwhile, Marguerite has lived a colorful life, experiencing great loves and losses from turn-of-the-century Vermont to 1920s New Orleans and back to the island of her childhood to live out the rest of her days as a hermit. A word of caution: Marguerite’s history is harsh. The more I read, the more I wept for her. A third character is the island as it lives and breathes, influencing the townspeople as if it had a personality of its own. Its harsh winters and small-town gossip do well to feed a sense of unease.
Confessional: I had a little trouble with chronology. I’ve tried to make sense of it a few times. Because Inness-Brown moves the timeline around I am not sure of the order of events after Marguerite’s death. She and James Jack argue about a married woman, Faith, on a Sunday night. Faith is leaving the island Monday morning and Tante wants James to go to her. Because of Faith’s marriage James refuses and out of anger sleeps in a secondary cabin, away from Tante. In the morning he finds Tante dead. At first James Jack feels the need to report the death and goes to the sheriff’s office. He changes his mind after he’s sitting across from the sheriff. Tante would not want the law involved with her remains. Meanwhile, Faith had a flight to catch sometime on Monday but she would have to go the mainland first. So when does James Jack catch up to her and ask her for help with Tante?
Line I loved, “I wanted to interpret your look, to read that gaze, but I had not yet learned the language in which your eyes wrote their message” (p 41). Stunning.
Author fact: According to the back flap of Burning Marguerite Inness-Brown lives on an island in Lake Champlain, Vermont. I have to wonder if Grain Island is modeled after South Hero.
Book trivia: Burning Marguerite is Inness-Brown’s first novel.
Setlist: “It Was Just One of Those Things”, and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “First Novels” (p 88) and again in the chapter called “New Orleans” (p 168).
~*LunaSea*~ 