Gratitude for Life's Grace Notes

Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I'm cheating slightly with this review as I actually read GRACE NOTES a long time ago - nearly seventeen years, in fact.

However, I do remember precisely when and where I read it, and why it was so important to me. GRACE NOTES was the first serious novel I was able to read after having given birth to my second child. I read it on Calgary Beach during a summer vacation on the Isle of Mull. The title itself was significant, as was the content. The heroine of the story has post-natal depression, and is a very creative young woman who composes her own music. The sounds she hears around her, and her memories of her childhood in Northern Ireland, all inform her creative output.

Like many young mothers, after the birth of my second child I simply could not bear to read anything too heavy or distressing at the time - I even had to avoid watching news items on the TV - and as I had always been such an avid reader of literature, I missed being able to read 'proper stuff'. The town where I lived had recently suffered a terrible tragedy involving the deaths of very young children, in such a way that I felt unable to read about anything sad which might trigger those thoughts. After a year, I came across Grace Notes, read the blurb, and realised this was probably going to be the book that would ease me back into 'serious and challenging literature'.

I read it sitting on the white sand of a remote Hebridean island, with a blue sky above and a sharp wind chill factor in the air. (It was Scotland, after all). It had been a difficult year - one I won't ever forget - but GRACE NOTES was a beginning.

Thank you, Bernard MacLaverty!



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