Fall Asleep Forgetting Review

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(More customer reviews)Fall Asleep Forgetting is an absorbing novel and one I'll find hard to forget. The loose-knit community of Cherry Grove trailer park, an odd group of misfits living on Long Island's eastern tip, has welcomed me in. And everyone I've met has played their part.
The story starts with a fragment from before, from 1956 when a woman called Fada steps out on her own. But suddenly it's May 2001, and the year has me wondering; the chapter headings all seem to lead to September...
Still, this tragedy is small. A stranger has died. Claude, who guards East Marion County Park has found the body. And nothing's very important about it, except that maybe Paul is dying too, in a quieter, less unexpected way.
Paul cooks. He creates great beauty from food. He structures picnics like seven-course delights, and decorates his restaurant to keep the mind inside, not out enjoying the weather. Enjoy both, he might tell you, but focus on one.
Paul's wife Sloan is the quiet one. You never quite know what she's thinking, but you try to guess, and you learn her past through others, feel oddly sorry for that and for her future.
Cherry's a fine one, making her own divided path, volatile but hugely kind. And Rae, who treads a different road, more conventionally unconventional you might say, is mother to Six, the small world's wildest child.
Old Saugerties spouts rules and regs and seems to hate them all, while Six spouts questions and the Bible. But all the world's instructions can't control love and death. And few, it seems, can even prepare us for them.
Claude's diary creates a picture as absorbing as her photographs. Sloan's silence and sensuality build questions on sex and desire. Six's queries demand thought. And even dying makes beauty in the September sun; beauty and pain, but focus on one.
A few months spent in their company makes these strangers become friends; a few hours reading by the warmth of a fire when summer seems unwilling to start; a few nights wondering at the secrets of the heart...
Small tragedies can be the biggest disasters to child or adult both, or a chance to grow. And sometimes it takes a community like Cherry Grove, nurtured and saved, to nurture and save. Not an easy book, not a rapid read, not a simple tale in sight; Fall Asleep Forgetting will have me drifting to the rhythms and beauty of its words, still trying to rationalize somehow all the things that happened there.
With thanks to the Permanent Press for giving me a bound galley for review.


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