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Flicker of Old Dreams: A Novel
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Flicker of Old Dreams: A Novel
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Flicker of Old Dreams: A Novel
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Flicker of Old Dreams: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this ebook

High Plains Book Award Winner for Fiction • Western Writers of America Spur Award Winner for Best Contemporary  Western Novel •  WILLA Literary Award Winner in Contemporary Fiction • Montana Book Award Honor Book

With the quiet precision of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and the technical clarity of Mary Roach’s Stiff, this is a novel about a young woman who comes most alive while working in her father’s mortuary in a small, forgotten Western town.

"The dead come to me vulnerable, sharing their stories and secrets . . . "

Mary Crampton has spent all of her thirty years in Petroleum, a small Western town once supported by a powerful grain company. Living at home, she works as the embalmer in her father’s mortuary: an unlikely job that has long marked her as an outsider. Yet, to Mary there is a satisfying art to positioning and styling each body to capture the essence of a subject’s life.

Though some townsfolk pretend that the community is thriving, the truth is that Petroleum is crumbling away—a process that began twenty years ago when an accident in the grain elevator killed a beloved high school athlete. The mill closed for good, the train no longer stopped in town, and Robert Golden, the victim’s younger brother, was widely blamed for the tragedy and shipped off to live elsewhere. Now, out of the blue, Robert has returned to care for his terminally ill mother. After Mary—reserved, introspective, and deeply lonely—strikes up an unlikely friendship with him, shocking the locals, she finally begins to consider what might happen if she dared to leave Petroleum.

Set in the American West, The Flicker of Old Dreams explores themes of resilience, redemption, and loyalty in prose as lyrical as it is powerful.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMar 13, 2018
ISBN9780062686718
Unavailable
Flicker of Old Dreams: A Novel
Author

Susan Henderson

Susan Henderson is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the author of two novels, The Flicker of Old Dreams and Up from the Blue, both published by HarperCollins. Susan lives in Kings Park, New York and blogs at the writer support group, LitPark.com.

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Reviews for Flicker of Old Dreams

Rating: 4.144230721153846 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Petroleum is a small town in the middle of nowhere, where dreams never have a chance to take root. As the only child of a funeral director, Mary's hopes of being an artist are displaced into the more practical and needed vocation of mortuary science. Mary grew up as the odd-ball child, where everyone knew her and taunted her for living in a funeral home. As an adult, Mary is isolated from most living human beings but yearns to connect with others, a need that comes out through her work. When Mary's neighbor grows ill and her son returns to care for her, Mary is the only one who is willing to give this young man a second chance. In turn, Mary begins to wonder if the world could be bigger than her very limited existence in the basement of her father's funeral home.Although morbid and gloomy, I enjoyed peering behind the scenes of Mary's life, where death was established as a daily experience and not something to be feared since she was a small child. A story of sadness and hope.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    ‘’This town wants you to be as it’s always been and do as it’s always done’’, he says, ‘’but what if that’s not what makes you happy?’’ In this small community, which seems to have been stuck in time, being happy isn’t important. It’s not even desirable. Being ‘’proper’’ is all that matters. ‘’Proper’’ according to the wishes of the people who inhabit the god-forsaken town and who seem to have been created without something vital for any human being. Heart and soul.Prepare for major distributions of anger on my part. Not because I didn’t like the novel. Obviously, I did. I loved it and more so because it created strong feelings in me. The most powerful of all being anger. But more on that later:) Petroleum is a depressing town that discriminates everyone and everything. Mary works as an embalmer in her father’s funeral parlour and many call her ‘’freak’’ because of her profession. Robert returns years after a tragic accident to look after his dying mother and the people behave as if he’s got the plague. Mary and Robert are two souls who struggle to stand for themselves in the midst of hatred, prejudice and hypocrisy.One could say that there’s not much ‘’action’’ in the course of the story, that not many ‘’things’’ happen. I don’t believe that ‘’action’’ is always necessary for a novel to be interesting. I’m sure that daily life offers many secrets worthy of a story. For me, the most important thing while reading is feelings, the way the story and the characters make me react and this is where I return to my initial thoughts in this review. I felt a lot of anger. Anger towards a community that has no tolerance for what they cannot understand or forgive. Anger towards a father who cares nothing for his daughter’s happiness and plays the ‘’righteous’’ part while he’s pretty dishonest and cold-hearted. Anger towards Mary because she was a coward and in need of a shock to put some sense into her mind, since she was unable to do so herself.Henderson structures the story around two themes, relationships and the sins of the past. The conflicts that lurk in the relationship between a parent and a child, between members of a community, between two people who love each other but people’s enmity keeps them apart. The writer successfully develops the issue of being unable to fully escape the past, a theme that is a favorite in Contemporary American Literature, and stresses the ‘’holier-than-thou’ attitude of the residents, the selfishness of a parent who fears loneliness and the bravery of the young generation to stand up for what is right. Robert has this strength, Mary has to find it.The characters- whether we like them or not- are interesting and well-written for the purpose each one of them serves. I liked Robert, I found him courageous, down to earth, considerate to those who mattered and rather calm as a person. He coped with hostility in an assuring, albeit a bit too meek, way. Mary gave me quite a trouble, I confess. I did like her, but I wanted more. You’re thirty years old, why do you let everyone treat you as if you are a naive child? She has retained some rather distorted notions of familial and social obligations in her head. Her father was a man I deeply loathed. Am I too harsh? Possibly. I wanted him to vanish, to get the Hell out of Mary’s life in some way. I haven’t been so furious with a character in a while. The real jewel character, though, is Doris. The mysterious woman in the window…I loved Henderson’s writing. It is direct and beautiful, the chapters are short, the narration is quick and never loses momentum. There was a certain kind of tenderness in the language, but no trace of melodrama and the dialogue was natural. It was hard for me to stop reading, I wanted to know how the story ended, how could Mary escape the suffocating environment in a place whose beauty was wasted in worthless, medieval notions of right and wrong.I found this novel to be a more realistic depiction of the narrow-minded small communities than the quaint little towns with the quirky characters we’ve come to see lately. Don’t get me wrong, I love those stories, but here we have the raw, unforgiving story of highly unforgiving people….Many thanks to Harper Perennial and Edelweiss for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A quiet book about a funeral director's daughter and a tragedy that haunts a family and a small town. Though this wasn't a mystery or thriller, I still couldn't put it down and I couldn't stop thinking about Mary and the life she was living in the small town where she is the last person to see all the dead. There is some beautiful language about living and dying here, and if you are morbidly curious, some great information about the process of getting a body ready for viewing. If you've ever wondered what it's like to live in a very small town, or if you feel like revisiting your own upbringing in a tiny town, read this book. Even if you're not interested in small towns, read this book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A small Midwestern town, a close knit community of framers, ranchers and those who work in the grain industry, these are proud, hardworking people. All this changes, when the towns golden boy, a terrific athlete is killed in a grain accident. His younger brother is working with him that day, and the town blames this young fourteen year old for the accident. The mill closes and the town slowly begins to die. Mary, a young girl already an outcast as her father is the towns funeral director and mortician. Now as an adult she helps her father in his business, has become expert at making sure the dead look their best for their visitation. Things go along, until Robert comes back to town to take care of his dying mother, the town is not willing to forgive but for Mary she sees a different side.A very melancholic tone to this novel, the kind I tend to be drawn to time after time. Great characterizations and a wonderful look at life in a small dying town. A look at how differences in thoughts and actions divide, about being different and not fitting into the preconceived stereotypes. It is touching, written with a great deal of empathy and grace. It is a beautiful and quiet novel.It is also an odd to the hardworking men, those who struggle against weather and other conditions beyond their control. Those who rise before sunup to take care of their livestock, work in their fields. Watching the youth of their town move away wanting a different life. Men and women who stick with the town, wanting to stay and die in the town they call their own.It is mostly though, Mary's story as she grows and learns to look beyond the familiar. A loving look at a father and daughter, who have lived alone all of Mary's life. Working together, yet not able to talk about the important things in their lives, to discuss their feelings. Until Robert returns to town, causing many things to change.ARC from Librarything.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Thanks to Library Thing for the ARC. I feel uncomfortable when I want to give a free for review copy of a book five stars. I see lots of other similar reviews out there that seem suspect, you know, maybe a rating error on the side of gratitude. But I am still going with five stars on this one. By the time I got to the end of the second page or so, I was thinking, golly, this reminds me of Kent Haruf. Some time later, I saw it mentioned on the back cover as well, something I tend to avoid reading...I prefer to be surprised. And I so hope that the author won't be slighted by being compared to another author, after all, Haruf was a wonderful author who won't be sending any more works from beyond the pale. That Henderson is here and has the potential of carrying on this legacy of the sparest, most poignant stories set in such stark settings in the soul of America is truly a treasure to be cherished.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A beautifully written book examining how death affects the residents of a small western town especially after a tragedy occurs to a young boy. The story is told from the point of view of a middle aged woman working in her father's funeral home as the embalmer. She has come to realize she is more comfortable around the dead than around the living and although her thorough description of the work she does might seem morbid, it in fact shows her reverence for the processes of the body that occur after death that will happen to everyone. She begins to see herself apart from this work and with an expanded awareness of her need to explore the world when she becomes involved with a man who comes back to town to be with his dying mother but who must deal with the anger of most of the residents for his role in the earlier tragedy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Disclosure: I received a free copy of THE FLICKER OF OLD DREAMS by Susan Henderson through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers Program. The Flicker of Old Dreams is an interesting combination of solitude and rage, quiet and storm, love and hate. Mary Crampton is the embalmist at her father's funeral home in Petroleum, Montana. She is introverted, considered a little weird, and feels most comfortable in the basement of her home, where she lovingly prepares her neighbors' bodies for burial. Petroleum is a dying town. People leave, people die, people wither. Mary sees it all. She remembers her dreams of being an artist and her desire to leave Petroleum, but her strong allegiance to her father keeps her there.Enter Robert Golden, a man home to take care of his dying mother. Robert is blamed for the death of his superstar brother many years ago. The town does not welcome Robert back, but Mary is pulled to him. Robert, who was physically outcasted from the town, and Mary, who is mentally outcasted, start a tentative friendship, then romance.Susan Henderson's writing is gripping yet delicate. My favorite scenes are when Mary is embalming and preparing the bodies for burial. The quiet solitude and love Mary feels for each resident is fully expressed in these scenes.If you love stories about family relationships, I would recommend The Flicker of Old Dreams. It's a quick, engaging and satisfying read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I picked up this book because I was intrigued by the storyline, but I was quickly won over by the exquisitely descriptive prose. Having lived for a couple of years in isolated prairie towns, I recognised both the character and desolation Henderson wove seamlessly into her setting, and being an introverted misfit, I saw plenty of myself in Mary Crampton. Somehow this book manages to be both a love story that eschews the typical saccharine and sultry tropes of romance as well as a thoughtful meditation on grief, loss, and making your life count for something. Every detail matters and fits together beautifully. This is unlike any other book I have read and will stick with me for a while.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a good novel with a fairly unique setting. A young woman living in a tiny, failing town in Montana scrapes out a living running a funeral business with her father. The town suffered a terrible tragedy in the past that resulted in the closing of the grain elevator and subsequent economic decline. A family member involved in the tragedy comes back into town after being gone many years. Excellent descriptions of small town lives and personalities and the land and weather of Central Montana. As a fan of Mary Roach's book 'Stiff', I personally found the funeral home setting and embalming information quite interesting. It's certainly not common to find in a novel of this type; it was well done, quite moving, and an important part of the main character's life.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very well written. I love the slow, meandering ways of the small town.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Sometimes a book comes along that is just beautiful and moving and special. Susan Henderson's novel The Flicker of Old Dreams is one such novel. Set in the small, economically depressed western town of Petroleum, Montana, this is the story of a woman who has never fit in but has lived there all her life and a man who has returned to the town that drove him away years ago in order to be there for his dying mother. It is not a love story; it is a self-acceptance story. And it is heartbreaking and gorgeously rendered.Mary is the embalmer in her father's funeral home. Her profession marks her out as strange in this rural farming community but she's been considered odd since her lonely, motherless childhood. Her painfully introverted, socially awkward personality hasn't made it any easier for her to fight against her outcast persona, at best ignored and at worst mocked. She's stayed in Petroleum helping her father but that was never her dream. Her dream, once upon a time, was to go to art school and become an artist. Now her only art is in preparing the people who come through the funeral home. The dead accept her ministrations, allowing her to feel an accepted part of things in ways that she hasn't since she was small. When she was a child, there was a terrible, tragic grain elevator accident at work where a boy on the verge of adulthood, a boy who was a star athlete, a boy who embodied everything that the town wanted to celebrate, died horribly. His younger brother Robert was with him at the time and town lore has it that it is he who caused the accident, or at least deserved the blame. Although still a teenager himself, Robert left town after his brother's death. In the aftermath of the accident, the other children allowed Mary, as the daughter of the undertaker, to reenact the tragedy with them, giving her a brief taste of acceptance that soon faded away. It is only when Robert reappears in town to spend his mother's last days with her and facing the scorn and anger of the unforgiving and downtrodden who blame him for the accident and the subsequent closure of the granary, that Mary realizes the cruelty and insularity of a town sitting in judgement, a town that has been only marginally kinder to her through the years.Both Mary and Robert have been rejected by the people of the town so it is not perhaps unlikely that they should find each other, tapping a place in each other's soul that no one else in Petroleum has ever bothered to touch. Mary narrates the novel, infusing her narration with all the loneliness in her. Her life echoes with sadness and exclusion and Robert brings a measure of understanding with him when he returns home. When Mary must go against her father's long-settled plans, plans that don't take into consideration Robert or his mother's needs and wants but instead the town's wants, she finds a measure of courage and self and rightness that she has never tried to use before. Henderson doesn't tie things up neatly. Mary fails Robert and herself multiple times even as she knows she's failing. She is drawn as knowing her flaws, her inability to communicate, her outsider status, but is unable to change, and definitely not as quickly as she might have wanted. She is a thoughtful narrator and the quiet resurrection of her dreams comes only haltingly. In Petroleum and in Mary, Henderson evokes a town hopeless with defeat and a main character who might just find her way out and away from the desperate rigidity and angry lashing out that this hopelessness has created. The writing is gorgeous and almost elegiac feeling even while it acknowledges the wrongs the town has done to Mary and to Robert and the quiet desperation that pervades many of its inhabitants' lives. This is very much a story of relationship and its lack, of the sins of the past carried forward in perpetuity, and the slow breaking away from forever acquiescing to what others think and want. It is a beautiful but realistic obituary for a place fading away, slowly and painfully, and the people who are forever marked by that place and its history but who finally need a life lived in wider opportunity, in greater acceptance, and in understanding.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Petroleum is a small town set somewhere in the western plains. The town is in the process of dying because of a dreadful accident in the once-thriving grain elevator, which killed a promising young man and tainted his younger brother, who is blamed for the tragedy. Now the elevator is closed, the trains don’t stop there, and the few residents left cling to their old ways and resentments. Mary Crampton was a very young child at the time of the accident; now she is her father’s business partner in the family funeral home, embalming the town’s dead. When younger brother returns to town to care for his dying mother, he and Mary strike up an unlikely friendship that sets her on a new path. I found it difficult to believe that people could hate younger brother so deeply for so long; other than that, I found this a satisfying portrait of small town life, and the relationship between an adult daughter and the widowed father who raised her.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This novel tells the really poignant tale of a town and its inhabitants in rural Montana. Without any profanity or pornography, the story is simply told well.Petroleum is slowly withering away and so are its residents. When a terrible accident occurs at the town’s grain elevator, it takes the life of Eddie Golden, a recent high school graduate. The tragedy changes the outlook of the town forever and its death knell tolls. When Eddie falls into the grain elevator and is suffocated, his 14-year old younger brother, Robert, remains helplessly dangling above for hours, in his harness. No one comes to cut him down. He is left to swing painfully as the harness cut into his flesh, because everyone blamed him for the catastrophe. After his screams for help went unanswered, he began to understand that he was being punished. The life’s blood of the town had just been drained, and they knew it no longer had a future. Soon, Robert, totally ostracized, would have to leave town. Mary Crampton, the daughter of the town’s funeral director, had witnessed the rescue effort. She was only a child, at the time.The years pass and Allen Crampton, a single parent, is the owner of the funeral home. His daughter Mary, now 30, is the embalmer. She had wanted to be an artist, but her dreams were thwarted by his needs and dreams for her, so instead of following her own dreams, she transferred her talent and artistic drive to her skill in making the dead look as well in death as they did in life. She believes that they have become her canvas. Being raised in a funeral home made Mary a pariah. She was a strange child who was ostracized and avoided, much the same as Robert Golden was, but she seemed to adjust to it, enjoying her lonely life and her solitude. As a child, she had often played alone because children were not permitted to play with her where she lived. When Mary played, she often pretended her dolls were dead bodies, and she tended to them with compassion. Most parents did not want their children to play in a mortuary. So the children learned to fear her because she lived in the funeral home, and they knew that she also often lived in close proximity to the dead. Both Robert Golden and Mary Crampton were unusual children who were often forced to be alone as they were rejected by the other kids. The children learned how to be cruel from their parents and they bullied and shamed Robert and Mary with taunts and nasty names. As the book proceeds, it becomes obvious that the townspeople were largely self-sufficient, relying on each other in their remote, rural town, but they were also still angry, holding onto their resentment of Robert because of the closure of the grain elevator years before . There were no distractions, no ways to move on, no new jobs. They didn’t even have a move theater. The major entertainment outlets were the local high school teams. As a town basketball hero, Eddie’s loss was felt by everyone, and they disregarded the needs of the 14-year old brother consumed with guilt about his own loss. Mary and Robert had never been friends. Both had muddled through their lives as outsiders in their home town. When Robert’s mother became seriously ill, he returned to Petroleum to help her. His presence was resented by all except for Mary. Soon, they found their way to each other, developing a friendship which empowered Mary to finally grow up and leave the clutches of her father, the town and its people. It is a moving story that will engage and touch the hearts of the readers as they watch the characters deal with their lives, their losses and their dreams.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Although Mary Crampton had dreams of being an artist when she was younger, she stayed on in the dying town of Petroleum. She lives with her father in the town’s funeral home and works as the embalmer. She now directs her art to the deceased that she works on, making them appear to be almost alive to help their loved ones through the funeral services. She’s a lonely woman and uncomfortable socializing. She feels more at ease with the dead than with the living. The local children taunt her and call her “Freak”. Petroleum is a struggling town and has been disintegrating since an accident twenty years prior took the life of a beloved high school athlete, Eddie Golden. His younger brother, Robert, only 14 years old at the time, was blamed for the accident. The granary was shut down and the train no longer came to town. But now Robert’s mother is dying and Robert has returned to Petroleum to care for her. When Mary becomes friends with Robert, it sets off old resentments throughout the town and ignites old dreams in Mary’s heart.This is a tender, heartfelt, gem of a book. Every word of it made its way into my heart to stay. This is a very talented author who writes like a poet with a powerful emotional punch. I found this book to be completely breathtaking and I read it in a single day as I couldn’t bear to part with it. So lovely, so haunting, so human.Most highly recommended.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Depressing. But still a very good read. Henderson managed to evoke a lot of emotions in me: sadness, empathy, a tiny bit of hope, and anger. A lot of anger, in fact, that people would blame a 14 year old boy for something over which he had no control, and let that blame grow into hate.

    It’s a very quotable book. My Kindle copy is full of highlights.

    I am reluctant to say that I recommend it, because I think a lot of people would find it too depressing. But it resonated with me because I was (am?) different, a little bit like Mary in some ways.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Mary Crampton is the embalmer in her father's funeral home in the tiny town of Petroleum, Montana. She has always felt uncomfortable and "other" in the town and is putting one foot in front of the other in a sort of gray, depressive haze. Her old dream was to become an artist, but she drifts into her father's business and inertia keeps her there. She is good at her job and loves her dad, with whom she has a reliably caring, if emotionally distant, relationship. She tends to the dead with compassion, making them look their best and privately taking a button from each outfit to keep as a memento.When Mary was a child, two young brothers attempt to clear a grain silo and the older brother, a star athlete and darling of the town, is killed. His brother, Robert is burdened with guilt and becomes the receptacle for the town's grief and blame. He leaves the town for many years and only returns when his mother is dying. A central conflict of the book arises from Robert's desire to create a funeral service for his mother when Mary's father had already taken it upon himself to make the arrangements, assuming Robert would never return. Mary and Robert, two outcasts, form a connection, although Mary's social awkwardness and her awareness of the townsfolks' disapproval, lead her to misstep in dealing with him. This is a beautifully written book that reminds me of the quiet, striking style of Kent Haruf. The father-daughter relationship is so well-done; these two love each other, but don't express that love in the most helpful way. which leads to an outburst that changes their life together. The process of Robert's mother's dying, and the description of the memento mori photograph of his dead brother, are stunning. I was crying at the end.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Even though this book started well enough, it got very depressing towards the end!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Mary thinks she knows all the secrets, lies and stories of her hometown, until Richard, who was blamed for his older brother’s death, returns years later to take care of their dying mother.
    An unlikely friendship blooms as the people let their true feeling of the past known and Mary discovers just how unforgiving small town life can be.
    A lyrical meditation on life lived outside the city; this powerful novel of resilience, redemption and human imperfection will leave you breathless. I simply loved this novel.