Under The Wide And Starry Sky by Nancy Horan
My Rating: 2/5 Stars
What I’ve learned is having faith is a truly rare gift, and that even if I’m filled with that much faith, or confidence, that I still have my doubts, those moments where it feels like it will all go to hell, but it won’t really matter because no one is paying attention anyway, and I can make whatever mistakes I need to make, and that ends up being another great gift: the opportunity to fail miserably without the whole world watching. Just when it seems like I’m at my lowest point, and there’s no way I can move up from the bottom of the glass, I realize that people really do care, that they are paying attention, and maybe I can’t measure it, or quantify it, or even extrapolate it and place it on a graph, but it’s there just the same. And while encouragement from others is a great and wonderful and beautiful thing, the best strength comes from within.
What I took away more than anything else from UNDER THE WIDE AND STARRY SKY is a sense of faith (not the religious kind): faith to stay in a relationship, faith to experiment with your writing, faith to scrap an entire story and burn it in the fiery embers of wood and ash, faith to realize that life will come to an end and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, faith to travel and live around the globe, faith to get married, and faith to stay married through the trials and tribulations of daily living.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne Stevenson may not have had what might be considered a normal relationship, but then normal is defined as it relates to you, and the creative process is about as far from normal as you can be. Having two writers in the same household practically puts you on another planet altogether, so they did have that going for them, even as Robert’s health faded.
Despite all this mojo working in its favor, I never really felt myself become one with this novel. The dialogue never really flowed like a river; the descriptive passages never really allowed me to become fully immersed in the tale; the characters resembled more ethereal creatures hovering in the distance; and the ending left me a bit unfulfilled.
I received this book for free through NetGalley.