The Quickening

The Quickening

Michelle Hoover

This is not going to be one of those books that you run to for an uplifting experience, Enidina (Eddie) Current and Mary Morrow are two very different women living quiet desperate lives from 1913 to 1950. Being farm wives and living far from town, they are the only neighbor that the other has and you could not find any two different people.

I found myself liking one character more than the other, not sure if that was the writer intention, but Eddie’s character was so much more for me then just a character in a book. She became real and her loves and her passions would just jump off the page and talk to me in a way that a character has not in a very long time.

Mary on the other hand was too tense. She was not cut out to be a farm wife and you could tell from the moment that she first spoke that she was not going to be, for me, a likeable character. Coming from a well to do family and having been run out of town as a young girl, Mary continued to have an edge that by the end of the book might not have been worn smooth.

In alternating chapters, Mary and Enidina tell their stories and how their lives, from the moment they met, would intertwine. Each takes the hard knocks differently, from new marriages, to childbirth, to the great depression, to the death of loved ones; these two women have been through it all and come out bruised and battered in a way that will leave an indelible mark on the reader.

Though I would not call this a depressing book, at the same time, I would not call it a book of hope. These are hard times that the women have lived through and each has come out more shattered than whole.

A memorable story has been told, a story that will resonate and will honor the physical and emotional hardships that women have faced and survived.