Songs of Willow Frost: A Novel
By: Jamie Ford / Narrated By: Ryan Gesell
Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
Abandon Hope all ye who enter here… until…
Oh Jiminy H. Cricket! Are you coming into Songs of Willow Frost expecting Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet but in shiny new clothes? Run, run like the wind, and don’t let the door slam ya in the keister on your way out cuz I’ll have no patience for you. Jamie Ford is like Jess Walter—he crafts himself anew for each book, and they’re all so very different but oh sooo very worthwhile. Nope, you’ll not find the bittersweet loveliness of the aforementioned work here.
Instead, you’ll find bad things as they go to worse and worse and worse. Until you’re wondering and hoping that there’ll be a Worst in the not so distant future because you don’t know how much more sorrow and misery you’ll be able to take.
12-year old William Eng has been living at the Sacred Heart, a Home for children during the Depression whose parents can’t, won’t, aren’t around to take care of them. He aches for his mother; the last time he saw her, she was listless in the tub, the bathwater pink and a chopstick with a sharp ornamental shell stuck to it beside her. On his birthday, or the day the Home declares is every child’s birthday, the children are taken to a film where he finds one of the actresses to be… his mother. She’s alive! But where is she?
He and his friend Charlotte, a blind girl who’s joining him because she’s about to be sent to a school for the blind where she’ll spend her days making brooms, escape the Home and set off on their own, looking for the actress Willow Frost.
And in a heartbeat, riiiiiight during that very first part of the book? BANG! Over! She’s found, and she is indeed Liu Sung, William’s mother. What? So soon? Turns out, this is only the beginning of Songs of Willow Frost because Ford takes us from Depression-era Seattle, and resettles time to the 1920s.
And so begins Liu Song’s tale, and you’ll hear of her misery, her wretchedness, violation and rape. There’s hope that’s followed by betrayal and heartbreak. There’s grievous suffering, hunger morphing into starvation. There are desperate acts undertaken because there are, quite simply, no options. The laws against Asians were harsh at the time, racism against them even more prevalent and accepted than now, and Liu Song’s journey is one ever downward spiral.
Soon William is back at the Sacred Heart because Life is still fraught and complicated. And things get worse and sadder for him. The main Sister of Sacred Heart, when addressing William’s frantic pleas to help Charlotte, tells him there’s evil in the world… yes… but sometimes there’s even greater evil, and she has to weigh and choose between the two. It’s a heavy burden, but she appears to bear it lightly. It’s only when she discovers that her decisions can bear tragic consequences that she offers something that doesn’t come lightly in this book: Hope.
Even then, mixed in is the reality of making the hard choices, the right choices, standing up to fear and bearing the burdens of a society that’ll judge one harshly. Heavy, this book is that. Tragic? Oh definitely. But it’s also GORgeously written all the way through with my only peeve being that often Ford tells us the characters Feel This, Feel That when we don’t need to be told. Rather, I’ve enough experience with his novels to know that Mr. Ford KNOWS how to write sorrow, knows how to write humiliation and shame, knows how to write the knowledge that one is shunned, feared, loathed. Oh good lord, can the man write or what?!
I wouldn’t have chosen Ryan Gesell for narrator going by his appearances on television; too clean cut, seems like he wouldn’t be able to do angst and despair. But nope, he does it really quite well, tho’ I did find the accents of the Sisters at the Home to be uneven and a tad off. All in all, however, he carried the twinning tales, the son, the mother, Charlotte and the other children well, and he balanced anguish and sorrowful detachment decently. At least he carried the burdens of the prose well enough that I never got to the point of wanting to chuck it all in and slash my wrists. Cuz seriously? Ford is writing of Pain and Pain Galore here.
No, this was NOT a jolly Listen, Hope did NOT carry the day tho’ it did save it. But it was beautifully written, and I do soooo enjoy a good old-fashioned wallow in all things emotion-laden.
And this, fellow Accomplice, was emotions done raw.
Lovely…
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