This book was being reviewed a lot on Instagram last year, and most people seemed to like it so I thought I'd give it a go.
On the front cover, the British writer Nina Stibbe is quoted as saying that 'Rachel Joyce is our own Elizabeth Strout', and I immediately thought; please don't say that. No-one can be compared to Elizabeth Strout!
I can see where Nina Stibbe is coming from because the eponymous Maureen Fry is a grumpy woman of a certain age with a wonderful husband who inexplicably loves her dearly, and that is exactly the premise for Strout's character Olive Kitteridge. Maureen Fry is the third book in a series of three novels, which can all be read independently, although the same characters appear in each one as Strout's characters do in her books. Sadly though, Maureen Fry is nowhere near as complex as Olive, and although the reviewer for the Observer thought the book was 'Deeply moving and life-affirming', it didn't quite hit the spot for me.
Let me stop comparing it to Elizabeth Strout for a minute and talk about what I actually thought about this book. It's more of a novella really as it only gets as far as 142 pages, and it tells how Maureen decides to drive alone to visit a memorial garden in Northumberland. The drive brings out the back story of how Maureen's son David committed suicide as a young man, and naturally the grief has taken it's toll and caused Maureen to close in on herself and push people away when they try to help.
A woman called Queenie, who Maureen has only briefly come into contact with, had created a memorial garden near the sea where anyone could come and leave something personal in memory of someone they have loved and lost. After meeting Maureen's husband Harold, Queenie took it upon herself to create something in David's memory, so this is what Maureen was travelling to see.
The book is easy to read but I thought the moments of revelation that Maureen experiences towards the end were rather contrived and I would have preferred something subtler, so no big recommendation from me.
One last thing that struck me was all the questions and topics for discussion that could be used at a book club that are printed at the back. I have noticed these in a number of books in recent years, and I do wonder how publishers decide which books they are going to push at clubs? Rachel Joyce must have known this was going to happen before the book was published as she presumably saw the questions even if she didn't write them. She also wrote two other explanatory sets of notes in case the book wasn't clear enough on its own, and it really wasn't that much of a stretch to understand. There are plenty more complicated book than this around that don't offer the reader any help at all.
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