A Widow’s Awakening
Maryanne Pope
Description (via Amazon.com)
A Widow’s Awakening draws you in from the first page as you listen in on a conversation one month before the death of Sam, a police officer. Readers are given a glimpse into an everyday marriage on the brink of a tragic event. Written as creative non-fiction, the story follows the character of Adri, Sam’s wife, as she learns to come to terms with the death of her husband. The story opens with what will be Adri s last vacation with her soul mate and grips the reader s interest until the end. A Widow’s Awakening is a page-turner full of conversational dialogue that reflects the feelings and thoughts of Adri, who is gripped with guilt over her last conversations with her husband, stunned by his sudden and needless death, and the path she is forced to follow that was not of her own choosing. A Widow’s Awakening is a tragic, heart wrenching, but humourous look at grief while giving the reader hope that life can go on after loss and it s what you do with it that counts. This book has something for everyone. It’s not a depressing book; it s an engaging, inspiring and powerful read. The book fits in several categories: self-help, biography, current events, politics, health, spirituality, psychology, death and dying, and grief. In addition, 20% of the proceeds of the sale of this book are going to the John Petropoulos Memorial Fund, a non- profit organization set up in memory of the author s husband. The Fund’s safety initiatives educate the public that workplace safety for emergency services personnel is a shared responsibility.
Review
This review is months overdue. I read the book early this year, after having a publicist pitch it to me via email. I loved every word, and despite the seemingly dark subject matter, found it to be uplifting and beautifully written. It’s a love-song to the author’s dead husband as well as a song of hope and new life.
Originally, reading this helped me accept the death of my brother-in-law, and I thought about sending it to my sister-in-law, because I thought she might appreciate the notion of having her husband’s presence as a sort of silent guardian, much as Adri did in this book, but ultimately, I decided not to.
So, if I loved this book so much, why am only posting the review five months later? Because just as I’d finished it, my nephew’s cancer was officially terminal. He would die about a month later, in mid-April, and during that time, instead of blogging, I was doing the bare minimum I could for work, and reading a whole bunch of escapist literature because I couldn’t cope with anything else.
My apologies, then, to Ms. Pope, because her book is wonderful, and I would recommend it to anyone who is dealing with grief, or who just wants a really candid look at a woman and her grief.
If you’re a writer, perhaps you’ll even take this book as a warning to find the time to really write while you still can.
A Widow’s Awakening
Maryanne Pope
312 pages, Self-published in September, 2008
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