Review of “Woman in Red” by Eileen Goudge
This is one of the best books I have ever read. I love it when that happens, when I find a book that I will never forget. THE WOMAN IN RED by Eileen Goudge is a story of tragedy,vengeance, romance, redemption, and the healing power of love.
On Gray’s Island everyone knows everyone’s business. And the business of Alice is that her son David was hit and killed when he was nine while riding his bicycle. The person driving the car who hit David was drunk, but he was also one of the richest, most influential people on the island, Owen White, son of Lowell White, who mysteriously disappeared when Owen was a boy.
Alice has a nervous breakdown and runs Owen down in her car with her only living son, Jeremy, in the car with her. She doesn’t kill Owen but she does put him in a wheelchair for life and spends 8 years in prison. When Alice returns she is a different person, but still Jeremy’s mother and her life hinges on mending fences with her son.
Enter Colin, a recovering alcoholic who lost his wife in 911 and lost everything else afterwards, his job, his friends, his self respect, and who is the grandson a William McGinty, a famous artist, now deceased, who was the secret lover of Eleanor, Alice’s grandmother. William painted a portrait of Eleanor and named it The Woman in Red and the picture hangs in the house he left to his grandson.
The story goes back and forth between the past and the present, back to the 1940s and the war, when Eleanor worked for Lowell and fell in love with the handsome rake, who impregnated her then abandoned her. In shame, Eleanor accepts the only marriage proposal coming her way to save face, marrying a man she didn’t love, Joe. But Joe is a good man and loves Eleanor and her baby Lucy as if she were his own. When Joe goes off to war, William enters the picture and an emotional love affair to rival Bogie and Bacall begins, but one that Eleanor and the also married artist, William, are too moral to consummate. The present has its own set of issues as Alice tries to rebuild her life by opening a restaurant, as her sister Denise fights to save the island from over development, and her husband Gary, the deputy chief of police who is secretly being blackmailed by Owen, who is now the mayor of Gray’s Island, finally snaps. In the meantime Jeremy has been accused of rape, the charges bogus, the mayor behind the railroad job that will hopefully once again ruin Alice’s life and give Owen his pound of flesh for the loss of his legs.
When I was reading the part where Eileen Goudge, the author, was describing Gary’s breakdown, I got chill bumps and became nervous. I am not sure a writer has ever done a finer job of creating a mood. This guy was losing it and I was about to lose it with him.
I will not tell you the ending, but I will say that Alice and Colin form a bond that helps save them both and that Owen finally gets what’s coming to him.
Great book!
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