At the beginning of June, my father-in-law was discussing the Industrial Revolution with some of us. He said something about wanting a good way to get a clear idea of how the implementation of factories affected ordinary people. I piped up and recommended North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is all about the two sides of the factory coin -- it shows the struggles of the factory owners and of the factory workers. I said it's pretty even-handed, and it's written by someone who lived in a manufacturing-centric city, and it's a really enjoyable read besides.
My father-in-law said maybe he would try it someday, if he lives long enough. I extolled its virtues some more. He was still unenthusiastic. I doubt he will ever read the book.
But I had reminded myself how very much I like this book. (After this third reading, I will bump that up a notch and say I love it.) All this took place while I was hastily packing for a will-we-or-won't-we vacation that we finally decided to take two days before we meant to leave, after having to toss all our original travel plans out the door and make new ones almost on the spot. The night before we left, I pulled out of my bag three books I'd meant to take along and put in a copy of North and South instead.
It's the only book I read over the two weeks of our vacation (not counting an audiobook we all listened to as a family). And it was exactly what I needed.
The reason we had to rearrange our travel plans was that my mom had gotten a preliminary diagnosis of lung cancer, pending more tests. Instead of spending two weeks of June at her house in Iowa with us, she had to stay here in Virginia with my brother's family and have a biopsy and other tests done. So we rejiggered all our plans and set off for a vastly different vacation than we had been looking forward to, all while having this possibility of Mom having cancer hanging over our heads.
And what is this book about? Why, a daughter whose mother slowly succumbs to a lingering illness, and who loses her father without warning. I lost my dad without warning last fall, and here I am, facing my mother's lingering illness. While we were gone, my mom did receive a diagnosis: stage 4 lung cancer. And Margaret Hale was right there beside me, bearing up under personal pain and loss and fear and worry and uncertainty, just like me.
I'm fully convinced the Holy Spirit sometimes nudges my hand to pick up specific books. Like when I read Summon the Light by Tor Thibeaux on the way to my dad's funeral. Like when I ditched other books and stuck this in my bag at nearly the last minute. Fiction has such power, and our Creator knows it. Why else would He have taught using fictional stories so often?
Particularly Good Bits:
"I must do something. I must make myself busy, to keep off morbid thoughts" (p. 35).
"I came here very sad, and rather too apt to think my own cause for grief was the only one in the world. And now I hear how you have had to bear for years, and that makes me stronger" (p. 129-130).
"My theory is a sort of parody on the maxim of 'Get money, my son, honestly if you can, but get money.' My precept is, 'Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something'" (p. 231).
"Come! poor little heart! be cheery and brave" (p. 304).
"It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards, we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me; to you it is new and oppressive" (p. 359).
(I find it very interesting and appropriate that all my favorite lines this time are very different from my favorite lines the first time I read this.)
If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some violence and quite a lot of character deaths, really.
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