Sunday, March 14, 2004
Book Review
Life and death, past and future intertwine in 'A Blessed Event'
By Melinda Bargreen
Seattle Times staff critic

As beginnings go, this one's a stunner. "A Blessed Event" begins with a car crash in the middle of the night, as Cal and Darla lie sleeping in their bedroom. The 1980 Buick, driven by Darla's best friend, overshoots a curve on the highway and smashes their bedroom wall "like a saltine cracker," missing the couple but gravely injuring the driver. But it's not just any driver: Joanne is nearly five months pregnant with a child she agreed to bear for Darla and Cal, because Darla is infertile.

Brain-dead but physically healthy, Joanne is placed on life support — and the complications have just begun. Darla, grieving for her friend, faces a pair of emergencies: Joanne's parents want to take her off life support, which means that the baby also will die. Worse, Cal agrees with them, even though he is the child's father. Cal isn't sure he wants to stay married to Darla, because he had become infatuated with Joanne while the baby was conceived.

With her life crumbling around her, Darla tries to figure out how to deal with Joanne's distraught parents and her own troubled husband, while she also probes into Joanne's history: Why was she always fighting with her father? And why was she driving that Buick at high speed in the middle of the night?

In an assured and poignant first novel, Jean Reynolds Page shifts back and forth between the time of the crash and a decade earlier, when the girls were in their teens. Rebellious Jo is having a hard time with her difficult father; Darla is having troubles of her own, seeing her newly diagnosed endometriosis as punishment for her burgeoning sexuality.

As Darla investigates their mutual past, the answers she uncovers aren't easy to come by, or easy to take. Over the course of many flashbacks, we begin to understand the nature of the girls' friendships, and we also discover some of Joanne's secrets. Seattle-area author Page adroitly ties up all these elements in a conclusion that is at least hopeful: Joanne's life may be over, but Darla — plucky, well-meaning and hopeful — has found a way to go forward.