FIERCE DISPUTE

by Helen Hooven Santmyer

Small-town America, ghosts, domesticity, and New World-Old World tensions - these combine in Helen Hooven Santmyer's second novel, The Fierce Dispute (1929), which feature a fiercely disputatious southern Ohio matriarch and her adult daughter locked in battle for the very soul of a child, Lucy Anne, from whose viewpoint much of the narrative unfolds.
The Fierce Dispute pits Margaret Baird, the proud bearer of the Linley-Hewitt-Baird family history, against Margaret's cosmopolitan and romantic daughter, Hilary. Set in the Xenia, Ohio, family home, the novel's real battleground is Lucy Anne herself, the child mired in conflict because she loves both her mother Hilary and grandmother Margaret.

Genres: Fiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1987

About the author

Helen Hooven Santmyer was born in 1895 and lived in Xenia, Ohio. In addition to her career as a writer, she worked as an English professor, a dean of women, and a librarian. She was 87 when her novel "And Ladies of the Club" was published as a Book of the Month, and passed away at the age of 90 in February of 1986. She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1996

Reviews

[Karyl · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, Helen Hooven Santmyer describes a long-ago world (even longer than she intended, as this book was published 80-odd years ago) in beautiful detail. In this novel, Lucy Ann lives in seclusion, away from the rest of the town, with her mother and grandmother who have engaged in a fierce tug-of-war over her. Lucy Ann's imagination is formidable; she conjures up her grandmother's playmates as her own, and watches from the sidelines as they play in her imagination, all the games that her grandmother described to her. Bit by bit, it's revealed why the grandmother holds so tightly to her granddaughter, but in the end, right prevails.

Possibly the ending wraps things up a bit too perfectly, but one doesn't read a Hooven Santmyer for an unsatisfying ending.

[Katrina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved "...And Ladies of the Club" a few years ago (it took me all of one summer to read!) and have since read a couple other of Santmyer's books. None of them have been as good or compelling as the first, but since I have this one I thought I may as well read it. So far, so good.

Additional note: I finally finished it and am glad I did, though I can't see myself ever reading it again. It's pretty pessimistic all the way through until the last chapter or two, so I was pleasantly surprised that it ended happily. I still feel very sorry for the little girl and have very few sympathetic feelings for the mother and grandmother. What selfish women!

[Ann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked this book because od the wonderful "....and theLadies of the club" that I read years ago and loved. This was a bit of a letdown. This was one of the author's early books. Written in the 1920's, it was out of print for 60 years , the re-released after "....and the Ladies of the Club". The characters and situations are unbeleivable. (One character has TB, yet no precautions are taken, even by thedoctor who declares his love ( after several brief encounters)