Title: The Lilac Bush Is Blooming
Author: Jan Surasky
Publisher: Sandalwood Press
ISBN: 978-0-988-277212
Pages: 290
Genres: Fiction
Reviewed by: Barbara Bamberger Scott
Buy on AmazonPacific Book Review
The Lilac Bush Is Blooming tells the story of an American family in flux and a girl who grows up to be its guide and mainstay. A family’s history revealed in dusty journals enlivens the dreams of a farm girl, endowing her with wisdom beyond her years.
Author Jan Surasky reveals an excellent example of character development in her writing style. Annie May is the middle child. Her older sister Carrie is pretty, popular, and artistic, and her little brother George is quiet but practical, expected to take over the family farm ever since the death of their father. They and their hardworking mother are assisted by Will, a young man hired to do the grown-up farm chores. Carrie, though older, is secretly insecure and often comes to her little sister for advice, and her mother relies heavily on her middle child for help with the flow of housework. Annie May always manages to find strong, comforting words for everyone, including Will.
The placid days of childhood are punctuated by her curiosity about the handwritten books she finds in the attic, tales of her forebears: a boy snatched from the streets of an English village and sold into indentured servitude in the new world; a half-Native American, half-white girl subsisting as best she can in two equally alien cultures; and a wild gypsy lass who has, or pretends to have, the second sight.
Surasky spans decades while deepening the characters. For example, when both Will and Carrie leave for college, Annie May feels a bit lost, but soon she too will be in college, balancing a social life with study while trying to help her mother and siblings from a distance. Georgie is drafted to serve in Vietnam, Carrie marries her first sweetheart, and Annie May is still the dutiful sister, everyone’s anchor, until an unexpected letter and a blurred photo take her halfway around the world.
Charmingly composed in purposely-unembellished prose from a bygone, more civil, generation, novelist Jan Surasky’s book depicts the mores of a midcentury American farm family coping with change, forced to grow beyond the local landscape. With her lucid writer’s vision, Surasky paints a heroine both believable and likeable, a young woman who is stronger than she knows, making a new, modern life for herself based on qualities of determination and the spice of differentness derived from her family’s past.
I have found myself entranced by the literary world encapsulated within the pages of The Lilac Bush Is Blooming as I believe others will also enjoy the sophisticated character development upon welcoming Annie May and her family into your home.
