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February
In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's night storm. In the early hours of the next morning, all 84 men aboard died. Helen O'Mara is one of those left behind when her husband, Cal, drowns. Her story starts years after the Ranger disaster, but she is compelled to travel back to the 'February' that persists in her mind, and to that moment in 1982 when, expecting a fourth child, she received the call informing her that Cal was lost at sea. A quarter of a century on, late one winter's night, Helen is woken by another phone call. It is her wayward son John, in another time zone, on his way home. He has made a girl pregnant and he needs his mother to decide what he should do. As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen realises that she must shake off her decades of mourning in order to help. With grace and precision, and a shocking ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa
310 pages, Hardcover
First published June 15, 2009
135 people are currently reading
5699 people want to read
About the author
Lisa Moore
75 books292 followersLisa Moore has written two collections of stories, Degrees of Nakedness and Open, as well as a novel, Alligator.
Open and Alligator were both nominated for the Giller Prize. Alligator won the Commonwealth Prize for the Canadian Caribbean Region and the ReLit Award, and Open won the Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Prize for Short Fiction.
Lisa has also written for television, radio, magazines (EnRoute, The Walrus and Chatelaine) and newspapers (The Globe and Mail and The National Post).
Lisa has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She also studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she became a member of The Burning Rock Collective, a group of St. John's writers.
Open and Alligator were both nominated for the Giller Prize. Alligator won the Commonwealth Prize for the Canadian Caribbean Region and the ReLit Award, and Open won the Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Prize for Short Fiction.
Lisa has also written for television, radio, magazines (EnRoute, The Walrus and Chatelaine) and newspapers (The Globe and Mail and The National Post).
Lisa has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She also studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she became a member of The Burning Rock Collective, a group of St. John's writers.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 787 reviews
September 24, 2021
Helen und Cal sind glücklich verheiratet und haben drei Kinder. Mit dem vierten Kind ist Helen gerade schwanger, als Cal stirbt. Plötzlich steht Helen alleine da und muss sehen, dass sie sich und ihre Kinder durchbringt. Das ist nicht immer einfach…
* Meine Meinung *
Dieses Buch hätte ein ganz wunderbares und gefühlvolles Buch werden können, denn die Idee ist sehr gut; man hätte viel daraus machen können. Aber leider verderben in meinen Augen der Schreibstil und die vielen Zeitsprünge die ganze Geschichte. In einem Kapitel ist man im Jahr 1980, dann ist man in 2008, dann 2005, dann 1982…
Normalerweise habe ich mit solchen Zeitsprüngen überhaupt keine Probleme, aber in diesem Roman wirken die Kapitel alle nur irgendwie zusammengewürfelt, haben keine Struktur, keinen logischen Aufbau. Jedes Kapitel für sich ist eine kleine Geschichte und scheint mit dem Ganzen gar nichts zu tun zu haben. Es gibt keinen richtigen Anfang und kein vernünftiges Ende; es gibt keinen „roten Faden“.
Manche Kapitel waren durchaus schön, aber oft habe ich mich beim Lesen auch gelangweilt. Und die Anführungszeichen bei den Dialogen haben mir auch gefehlt.
Schade, ich hatte hier eindeutig mehr erwartet!
* Meine Meinung *
Dieses Buch hätte ein ganz wunderbares und gefühlvolles Buch werden können, denn die Idee ist sehr gut; man hätte viel daraus machen können. Aber leider verderben in meinen Augen der Schreibstil und die vielen Zeitsprünge die ganze Geschichte. In einem Kapitel ist man im Jahr 1980, dann ist man in 2008, dann 2005, dann 1982…
Normalerweise habe ich mit solchen Zeitsprüngen überhaupt keine Probleme, aber in diesem Roman wirken die Kapitel alle nur irgendwie zusammengewürfelt, haben keine Struktur, keinen logischen Aufbau. Jedes Kapitel für sich ist eine kleine Geschichte und scheint mit dem Ganzen gar nichts zu tun zu haben. Es gibt keinen richtigen Anfang und kein vernünftiges Ende; es gibt keinen „roten Faden“.
Manche Kapitel waren durchaus schön, aber oft habe ich mich beim Lesen auch gelangweilt. Und die Anführungszeichen bei den Dialogen haben mir auch gefehlt.
Schade, ich hatte hier eindeutig mehr erwartet!
August 10, 2009
I have been waiting for a new book by Lisa Moore and this did not disappoint. I read slowly right from the start, so that I could absorb each essential phrase, to appreciate how one sentence moved to the next, to marvel at a particular paragraph, or to pause at the end of a subsection to reflect on the way Lisa Moore had crafted a scene.
February is a fictional story about how one Newfoundland family of five deals with the loss of husband and father Cal, in the real-life tragic sinking of the offshore rig, the OCEAN RANGER, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. The main characters are wife Helen, eldest child and only son John, and, in flashback scenes, Cal. Secondary characters are Helen’s sister Louise; Jane, connected to John; and John’s three younger siblings: Lulu, Cathy, and Gabrielle. Then there is Barry, the man who not only renovates the house, including choosing the correct paint, but eventually alters Helen’s life. Like a watercolour painting, Moore builds layer upon layer to build the story from its foundation to its final coming-together.
Part one begins November 2008 with son John phoning his mother from Singapore. He asks her: Have you ever tried to figure out the difference between what you are, and what you have to become? This is essentially the theme of the novel. Then Moore whisks us to February 14, 1982 when the OCEAN RANGER begins to sink. John and Helen are presented as more affected by the loss than his three sisters. Back again to John, as Jane, the woman he spent a week with seven months ago, informs him she is pregnant. This is the present-time story-line. His mother would force him to do the right thing, whatever that was. She would know. But the heart of the book chronicles Helen’s decades-long grief over the loss of her husband. Flash back to 2008 and her delivery of Gabrielle, the youngest child, born after Dad drowned at sea. Then, Call me when you get to New York, his mother said. We’ll talk about the baby.
Moore has created an interesting structure here. Five sections are broken into subheads with titles, including dates for each. Most of the story takes place during 2008: June, August, October and November; not in order, and mostly in November. The rest slips back to 1972; ’75; ’78; ’80; 82; ’87; ’95; ’97; more emphasis on February, 1982, but again, not chronological. And finally, the fifth part takes place in January and February 2009. (The book’s release date was June 1, 2009.)
The writing is also interesting: Lisa Moore writes the way we often think, with thoughts jumping at random. As with the structure, this semi-stream-of-consciousness style is a very effective way to draw us in and really experience Helen’s grief. At times, Helen’s view of the past and the present reflect a distorted view of reality; thoughts that create images like one of those carnival mirrors. Except that rather than comic, more often the optical-feeling effect is of multiple parts, missing parts, huge parts; memories can loom large, or have pieces missing, or be jumbled together. The present can be distorted by memories of the past. Juxtapose this with clarity of vision that is so startling it can leave the reader gasping.
With such structure and writing style, one might think the story would be difficult to follow. On the contrary: it serves to add breadth and depth – of feeling, of sensory detail, of the moment-to-moment momentum of observation, as when her father-in-law phones to tell her he’d identified Cal:
Helen lost her peripheral vision. She could see a spot about the size of a dime in a field of black. She tried to focus on the surface of the kitchen table. It was a varnished pine table they’d bought at a yard sale, and in that little circle she could see the grain of wood and a glare of overhead light. She had willed the spot to open wider so she could take in the bowl with the apples and the side of the fridge and the linoleum, and then the window and the garden. Her scalp was tingling and a drip of sweat ran from her hairline down her temple. Her face was damp with sweat as if she’d been running.
Which brings me to the use of light as a motif, starting with the very first lines: Helen watches as the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener. There is a stainless steel cone to catch the spray of orange sparks that fly up. Here is Helen, up at 4:00 a.m., on the night the rig began to list, though she doesn’t know that yet. There’s a storm happening outside:
But then a plow came down over the hill and it was bleating and the revolving light on the top of the cab struck the frosted window and Helen could see thousands of crackles and crystals and grey shimmer burning as white as flashbulb, violet-white, just for an instant, burning so fiercely it hurt somewhere behind her eyes.
It hurt somewhere deep in her skull. It felt as though the light had pierced her, gone through, and the mad design of the frost, infinitely curling in on itself, had been printed on her retina.
It felt like a puncture. A rapture.…the light hitting the frost at that second had refracted, each minute crystal a hall of mirrors, so that the intensity was hugely magnified.
If only I could quote three pages (!) here, because it all ties in with her being pregnant; and leaving a pot burning on the stove, and hurling the pot outside into the snow; and dreaming of Cal, and being afraid.
February is the shortest month of the year; but it often seems the longest, at least in parts of Canada, when winter can be unrelenting; will February never end? Helen’s grief is relentless for twenty-six years. For me, Helen’s grief was an intimate experience; at once familiar and fresh at the same time. It may sound contradictory, but it never seemed morose; there was beauty in Helen’s memories, in her grieving. In writing this story, Moore knew that she had to reveal glimpses of the intense love Helen and Cal shared; so that we could understand how much Helen had really lost. The bright flame of their love extinguished in a flash when Cal died, plunging Helen into an inward life of loneliness, of darkness. But like the seasons, in the end, Helen cycles back to emerge from the dark into light once more. February is a passionately crafted story that rang true to me, true to life.
February is a fictional story about how one Newfoundland family of five deals with the loss of husband and father Cal, in the real-life tragic sinking of the offshore rig, the OCEAN RANGER, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. The main characters are wife Helen, eldest child and only son John, and, in flashback scenes, Cal. Secondary characters are Helen’s sister Louise; Jane, connected to John; and John’s three younger siblings: Lulu, Cathy, and Gabrielle. Then there is Barry, the man who not only renovates the house, including choosing the correct paint, but eventually alters Helen’s life. Like a watercolour painting, Moore builds layer upon layer to build the story from its foundation to its final coming-together.
Part one begins November 2008 with son John phoning his mother from Singapore. He asks her: Have you ever tried to figure out the difference between what you are, and what you have to become? This is essentially the theme of the novel. Then Moore whisks us to February 14, 1982 when the OCEAN RANGER begins to sink. John and Helen are presented as more affected by the loss than his three sisters. Back again to John, as Jane, the woman he spent a week with seven months ago, informs him she is pregnant. This is the present-time story-line. His mother would force him to do the right thing, whatever that was. She would know. But the heart of the book chronicles Helen’s decades-long grief over the loss of her husband. Flash back to 2008 and her delivery of Gabrielle, the youngest child, born after Dad drowned at sea. Then, Call me when you get to New York, his mother said. We’ll talk about the baby.
Moore has created an interesting structure here. Five sections are broken into subheads with titles, including dates for each. Most of the story takes place during 2008: June, August, October and November; not in order, and mostly in November. The rest slips back to 1972; ’75; ’78; ’80; 82; ’87; ’95; ’97; more emphasis on February, 1982, but again, not chronological. And finally, the fifth part takes place in January and February 2009. (The book’s release date was June 1, 2009.)
The writing is also interesting: Lisa Moore writes the way we often think, with thoughts jumping at random. As with the structure, this semi-stream-of-consciousness style is a very effective way to draw us in and really experience Helen’s grief. At times, Helen’s view of the past and the present reflect a distorted view of reality; thoughts that create images like one of those carnival mirrors. Except that rather than comic, more often the optical-feeling effect is of multiple parts, missing parts, huge parts; memories can loom large, or have pieces missing, or be jumbled together. The present can be distorted by memories of the past. Juxtapose this with clarity of vision that is so startling it can leave the reader gasping.
With such structure and writing style, one might think the story would be difficult to follow. On the contrary: it serves to add breadth and depth – of feeling, of sensory detail, of the moment-to-moment momentum of observation, as when her father-in-law phones to tell her he’d identified Cal:
Helen lost her peripheral vision. She could see a spot about the size of a dime in a field of black. She tried to focus on the surface of the kitchen table. It was a varnished pine table they’d bought at a yard sale, and in that little circle she could see the grain of wood and a glare of overhead light. She had willed the spot to open wider so she could take in the bowl with the apples and the side of the fridge and the linoleum, and then the window and the garden. Her scalp was tingling and a drip of sweat ran from her hairline down her temple. Her face was damp with sweat as if she’d been running.
Which brings me to the use of light as a motif, starting with the very first lines: Helen watches as the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener. There is a stainless steel cone to catch the spray of orange sparks that fly up. Here is Helen, up at 4:00 a.m., on the night the rig began to list, though she doesn’t know that yet. There’s a storm happening outside:
But then a plow came down over the hill and it was bleating and the revolving light on the top of the cab struck the frosted window and Helen could see thousands of crackles and crystals and grey shimmer burning as white as flashbulb, violet-white, just for an instant, burning so fiercely it hurt somewhere behind her eyes.
It hurt somewhere deep in her skull. It felt as though the light had pierced her, gone through, and the mad design of the frost, infinitely curling in on itself, had been printed on her retina.
It felt like a puncture. A rapture.…the light hitting the frost at that second had refracted, each minute crystal a hall of mirrors, so that the intensity was hugely magnified.
If only I could quote three pages (!) here, because it all ties in with her being pregnant; and leaving a pot burning on the stove, and hurling the pot outside into the snow; and dreaming of Cal, and being afraid.
February is the shortest month of the year; but it often seems the longest, at least in parts of Canada, when winter can be unrelenting; will February never end? Helen’s grief is relentless for twenty-six years. For me, Helen’s grief was an intimate experience; at once familiar and fresh at the same time. It may sound contradictory, but it never seemed morose; there was beauty in Helen’s memories, in her grieving. In writing this story, Moore knew that she had to reveal glimpses of the intense love Helen and Cal shared; so that we could understand how much Helen had really lost. The bright flame of their love extinguished in a flash when Cal died, plunging Helen into an inward life of loneliness, of darkness. But like the seasons, in the end, Helen cycles back to emerge from the dark into light once more. February is a passionately crafted story that rang true to me, true to life.
March 13, 2013
I tried.
I wanted to like this book. My goal this year was to read each of the five "Canada Reads" choices, so that I could follow along with the CBC debates. These were supposed to be quintessential Canadian novels - the cream of the crop.
Perhaps I made a mistake in trying to read this during February itself - the most grey, depressing time of year here. Maybe in the summer I will try again. In the meantime though, there was so much I just could not like: the main characters frustrated me, I found the portrait of the widow/mother to be heavy-handed. ("I get it," I thought, over and over again. "She's a widow, the whole thing is tragic. Yes, yes, she's been very stoic...")
And then the complete lack of quotation marks. Again, I get it: the author clearly wants us to look at the story as though we were looking through the lens of a camera, or leafing through old photos. Perhaps it's my own prejudice, or being far too much of a stickler for grammar, but damn it, use the punctuation you were given as a writer. It's not "stylish", not "bold" - it just makes your prose more difficult to read, and is distracting to boot. I'm against the vandalism of library books... but ye gods! I wanted so badly to take a red pen to the whole thing.
I wanted to like this book. My goal this year was to read each of the five "Canada Reads" choices, so that I could follow along with the CBC debates. These were supposed to be quintessential Canadian novels - the cream of the crop.
Perhaps I made a mistake in trying to read this during February itself - the most grey, depressing time of year here. Maybe in the summer I will try again. In the meantime though, there was so much I just could not like: the main characters frustrated me, I found the portrait of the widow/mother to be heavy-handed. ("I get it," I thought, over and over again. "She's a widow, the whole thing is tragic. Yes, yes, she's been very stoic...")
And then the complete lack of quotation marks. Again, I get it: the author clearly wants us to look at the story as though we were looking through the lens of a camera, or leafing through old photos. Perhaps it's my own prejudice, or being far too much of a stickler for grammar, but damn it, use the punctuation you were given as a writer. It's not "stylish", not "bold" - it just makes your prose more difficult to read, and is distracting to boot. I'm against the vandalism of library books... but ye gods! I wanted so badly to take a red pen to the whole thing.
April 24, 2017
The oil rig "Ocean Ranger" began to sink off the coast of Newfoundland on Valentine's Day 1982. The rig was gone, and every man on it perished in the stormy disaster by the next day. Helen O'Mara was left with three children, and a fourth on the way, when her beloved Cal died.
"Somehow Helen had picked up the idea that there was such a thing as love, and she had invested fully in it. She had summoned everything she was, every little tiny scrap of herself, and she'd handed it over to Cal and said: This is yours....It wasn't just dumb luck that Cal knew what the gift was worth; that's why she gave it to him in the first place. She could tell he was the kind of guy who would know." (49) Grief and love are all wrapped up in each other in this book. The story goes back and forth between the present and the memories of Helen and her eldest child John. Themes of death and birth are strong with Cal's death followed by the birth of their fourth child, and a later subplot about the February birth of John's child.
Lisa Moore's writing is sensuous and real. She brings the reader into the characters' bodies and minds to experience all the love, numbing grief, and other emotions that life can bring.
"Somehow Helen had picked up the idea that there was such a thing as love, and she had invested fully in it. She had summoned everything she was, every little tiny scrap of herself, and she'd handed it over to Cal and said: This is yours....It wasn't just dumb luck that Cal knew what the gift was worth; that's why she gave it to him in the first place. She could tell he was the kind of guy who would know." (49) Grief and love are all wrapped up in each other in this book. The story goes back and forth between the present and the memories of Helen and her eldest child John. Themes of death and birth are strong with Cal's death followed by the birth of their fourth child, and a later subplot about the February birth of John's child.
Lisa Moore's writing is sensuous and real. She brings the reader into the characters' bodies and minds to experience all the love, numbing grief, and other emotions that life can bring.
July 26, 2017
Some may say that this is a book about death or life or love, but for me this is a book about the "ifs" and the "whens."
The plot is irrelevant because whatever the plot is it is only the plot because of the perspective from which the story is told. It is a story of moments, the ifs and whens of one woman's life, and those moments, unrelated but for the woman who experienced them, are the tale.
February is a novel of fragments. And in those fragments is one of the truest stories I've ever read.
I've read better from Lisa Moore (very slightly better), but there are few -- and only a few -- authors who can write as well as Moore on her worst day let alone her best. And this book is from one of her very good days.
I can't see this being a book that I would read again, but I loved the journey, and I would recommend it to anyone who'd like to spend a few days living a life with someone worth knowing.
The plot is irrelevant because whatever the plot is it is only the plot because of the perspective from which the story is told. It is a story of moments, the ifs and whens of one woman's life, and those moments, unrelated but for the woman who experienced them, are the tale.
February is a novel of fragments. And in those fragments is one of the truest stories I've ever read.
I've read better from Lisa Moore (very slightly better), but there are few -- and only a few -- authors who can write as well as Moore on her worst day let alone her best. And this book is from one of her very good days.
I can't see this being a book that I would read again, but I loved the journey, and I would recommend it to anyone who'd like to spend a few days living a life with someone worth knowing.
March 2, 2020
Lisa Moore must have lost a significant someone in her life, she writes so eloquently of grief and the process of putting one’s life back together again after a tremendous loss. In addition to that, she writes like a dream! The combination makes this an excellent book.
Moore leads the reader through jumps in time, from when Helen O’Mara had first met her husband, the births of their three children, his death in the Ocean Ranger oil rig disaster, and the hard work that the family does to overcome this tragic loss. If you’ve read about the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance), you’ll recognize them all. Also their recurring nature, repeating on you when you least expect it.
There’s no such thing as closure, but there is such a thing as building a new life. Some days, you have to retreat to your bedroom and hide from the world and some days, like Helen in her yoga class, you can say, “I am ready for the warrior poses.”
”Helen unlocks her front door holding an armful of groceries, and there are three empty floors and silence. It is a relief. Solitude, she thinks, is a time-release drug, it enters the system slowly and you become addicted. It’s not an addiction; it’s a craft. You open the closet doors very carefully so loneliness doesn’t pounce out.”
Moore leads the reader through jumps in time, from when Helen O’Mara had first met her husband, the births of their three children, his death in the Ocean Ranger oil rig disaster, and the hard work that the family does to overcome this tragic loss. If you’ve read about the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance), you’ll recognize them all. Also their recurring nature, repeating on you when you least expect it.
There’s no such thing as closure, but there is such a thing as building a new life. Some days, you have to retreat to your bedroom and hide from the world and some days, like Helen in her yoga class, you can say, “I am ready for the warrior poses.”
February 16, 2013
This book languished in a stack on a to-be-read shelf for almost two years, squashed between a Julian Barnes below and some short story anthology above.
It was 31 years ago on Valentine's Day that the Ocean Ranger oil rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland, killing all aboard.
31 years later, on Valentine's Day yesterday, February won the Canada Reads award. (Oh crap, now the masses will like it, it will be popular, and more often than not that means the writing sucks, but jeez, it's Lisa Moore, she's a good writer. She has cred!) I kept putting it off, fearing the mawkishness that was sure to fill the pages of a book about a widow of one of the dead crewmen. But that's not how it turned out. This isn't about wallowing in grief and outrage. It rises above that. The narrative skips around in time, both directly and indirectly as memories and dreams. This seems ideal for this type of story, because the present is so pregnant with the past. Very slowly the widow Helen begins to weave the future into her existence.
The structure, the architecture were great, but what I enjoyed the most was Moore's expressive prose. The effortless hyper-realism of her descriptions brought it to life, and overarching it all were quiet wisdoms and simple but profound insights. Lovely.
It was 31 years ago on Valentine's Day that the Ocean Ranger oil rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland, killing all aboard.
31 years later, on Valentine's Day yesterday, February won the Canada Reads award. (Oh crap, now the masses will like it, it will be popular, and more often than not that means the writing sucks, but jeez, it's Lisa Moore, she's a good writer. She has cred!) I kept putting it off, fearing the mawkishness that was sure to fill the pages of a book about a widow of one of the dead crewmen. But that's not how it turned out. This isn't about wallowing in grief and outrage. It rises above that. The narrative skips around in time, both directly and indirectly as memories and dreams. This seems ideal for this type of story, because the present is so pregnant with the past. Very slowly the widow Helen begins to weave the future into her existence.
The structure, the architecture were great, but what I enjoyed the most was Moore's expressive prose. The effortless hyper-realism of her descriptions brought it to life, and overarching it all were quiet wisdoms and simple but profound insights. Lovely.
January 24, 2016
Brilliantly constructed vision of one woman's grief in the wake of her husbands death, when the oil rig he works on sinks into the sea, leaving her regnant and with three children to raise.
Interspersed with her stages of grief, is the call from her son John, flying back from Tasmania via New York bearing news that he is to become a father for the first time, a role he has spent all his adult years avoiding, until a chance week in Iceland with Jane, a woman who had been equally set on avoiding becoming a mother.
It was never overly melancholic, although Helen's recollections and reconstructions of what may have happened to her husband in those last minutes, her studying of the manuals to understand how to resolve the problem that caused the sinking reminded me somewhat of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), however life continues around Helen and those narratives reminded me of the work of Anne Tyler, and so we seesaw between the practical elements of daily life and the introspection of a death that stays with someone their entire life and in those still moments, returns as potently, as if it were yesterday.
Highly recommended.
Interspersed with her stages of grief, is the call from her son John, flying back from Tasmania via New York bearing news that he is to become a father for the first time, a role he has spent all his adult years avoiding, until a chance week in Iceland with Jane, a woman who had been equally set on avoiding becoming a mother.
It was never overly melancholic, although Helen's recollections and reconstructions of what may have happened to her husband in those last minutes, her studying of the manuals to understand how to resolve the problem that caused the sinking reminded me somewhat of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), however life continues around Helen and those narratives reminded me of the work of Anne Tyler, and so we seesaw between the practical elements of daily life and the introspection of a death that stays with someone their entire life and in those still moments, returns as potently, as if it were yesterday.
Highly recommended.
February 19, 2013
"Solitude, she thinks, is a time-release drug... it enters the system slowly and you can become addicted. It's not an addiction, it is a craft."
On Valentine's Day 1982, the Ocean Ranger, an assumed-to-be unsinkable oil rig, sank during a vicious storm out in the North Atlantic. Thirty years later the tragic events of that night still resonate deeply with the affected communities of Newfoundland. Families lost fathers, brothers, sons and lovers during a night when hope and prayers for a miracle turned into despair and grief: all eighty four crew were lost, either on board or in the ice cold water. Newfoundland award winning author, Lisa Moore's 2009 novel February fictionalizes the deep physical and emotional shockwaves in the aftermath of the disaster by telling the story of one widow, her profound grief and the long-lasting scars on her soul while putting all her energy into bringing up her family and healing herself.
Lisa Moore's heroine, Helen, thirty at the time of the disaster, was robbed of her husband Cal, the love of her young life, the breadwinner for their young family with three small children with a fourth on the way. Much of the story is set in 2008, yet with Helen's mind often wandering back to that fateful night in 1982, the innocent years prior to the disaster and the many years since. Helen reflects on her emotional state of mind at the time as "being outside": "The best way to describe what she felt: She was banished. Banished from everyone and from herself." Still, the daily life had to go on while grief and pain were kept locked into the inner folds of her mind. "Helen wanted the children to think that she was on the inside, with them. The outside was an ugly truth that she planned to keep to herself."
Grief, as we know it, is unique to each person, intimately personal and not always easy to understand for others. Moore's capacity to capture and express the individuality of Helen's grieving in a way that we as readers can relate to it in our own personal ways, speaks to the quality and thoughtfulness of her writing. In 2009, I have to admit, this was not a book that I wanted to read, given my own recent loss, but four years later, I can appreciate Helen's story and the winding and twisting process of her coming to terms with her grief and her life. February is in no way a sad or depressing book. Moore brings enough detail to Helen's life moving forward to keep the reader supportively engaged. Helen is surrounded by her three daughters and John, her oldest. John is a major character in the novel and we follow his growing up from the ten year-old at the time of the disaster to a young man who develops his own means to deal with loss. The image of the absent father is well developed through John's and Helen's recollections. As a result, Cal remains very much a part of the novel.
Even after many years, Helen's mind keeps returning to the night of the disaster. Not knowing what really happened in the last hours of Cal's and his mates' lives, does not let her rest. What did they know and understand of the crisis? "They all knew they weren't safe. They all knew. But they had decided not to tell anyone. But it leaked out of them in larks and pranks and smutty puns, and it leaked sometimes out in a loneliness that made phone calls from land hard to handle."
February is not a chronological account of Helen's efforts "to get back on her feet". Not at all. Like memories and dreams, the narration jumps timelines, joining unrelated events or triggering sudden vivid images. Moore's narrative flows from the present in 2008 to 1982, the other still vivid present, to times before and in between... Sometimes her chapter dates give you an indication where we are, often, though, she relies on the reader to figure out where Helen's mind is at that moment. And, with a bit of reading into the novel, you do.
Moore has a subtle and compassionate way to convey her character's story. At times, her writing structure reminded me of a puzzle, where, unexpectedly, one small 'piece', be it somebody's gesture or the colour of the ocean on a misty night, connects several until then unconnected images and a broader perspective falls into place. Overall, this is a beautifully developed and affecting story, set in a broader context that is relevant as much today as it was then. Some of the side stories seem to be more than complementing the central story and distracted to some degree. The novel's ending may not be to everybody's liking, but these, in the end, are minor irritants.
On Valentine's Day 1982, the Ocean Ranger, an assumed-to-be unsinkable oil rig, sank during a vicious storm out in the North Atlantic. Thirty years later the tragic events of that night still resonate deeply with the affected communities of Newfoundland. Families lost fathers, brothers, sons and lovers during a night when hope and prayers for a miracle turned into despair and grief: all eighty four crew were lost, either on board or in the ice cold water. Newfoundland award winning author, Lisa Moore's 2009 novel February fictionalizes the deep physical and emotional shockwaves in the aftermath of the disaster by telling the story of one widow, her profound grief and the long-lasting scars on her soul while putting all her energy into bringing up her family and healing herself.
Lisa Moore's heroine, Helen, thirty at the time of the disaster, was robbed of her husband Cal, the love of her young life, the breadwinner for their young family with three small children with a fourth on the way. Much of the story is set in 2008, yet with Helen's mind often wandering back to that fateful night in 1982, the innocent years prior to the disaster and the many years since. Helen reflects on her emotional state of mind at the time as "being outside": "The best way to describe what she felt: She was banished. Banished from everyone and from herself." Still, the daily life had to go on while grief and pain were kept locked into the inner folds of her mind. "Helen wanted the children to think that she was on the inside, with them. The outside was an ugly truth that she planned to keep to herself."
Grief, as we know it, is unique to each person, intimately personal and not always easy to understand for others. Moore's capacity to capture and express the individuality of Helen's grieving in a way that we as readers can relate to it in our own personal ways, speaks to the quality and thoughtfulness of her writing. In 2009, I have to admit, this was not a book that I wanted to read, given my own recent loss, but four years later, I can appreciate Helen's story and the winding and twisting process of her coming to terms with her grief and her life. February is in no way a sad or depressing book. Moore brings enough detail to Helen's life moving forward to keep the reader supportively engaged. Helen is surrounded by her three daughters and John, her oldest. John is a major character in the novel and we follow his growing up from the ten year-old at the time of the disaster to a young man who develops his own means to deal with loss. The image of the absent father is well developed through John's and Helen's recollections. As a result, Cal remains very much a part of the novel.
Even after many years, Helen's mind keeps returning to the night of the disaster. Not knowing what really happened in the last hours of Cal's and his mates' lives, does not let her rest. What did they know and understand of the crisis? "They all knew they weren't safe. They all knew. But they had decided not to tell anyone. But it leaked out of them in larks and pranks and smutty puns, and it leaked sometimes out in a loneliness that made phone calls from land hard to handle."
February is not a chronological account of Helen's efforts "to get back on her feet". Not at all. Like memories and dreams, the narration jumps timelines, joining unrelated events or triggering sudden vivid images. Moore's narrative flows from the present in 2008 to 1982, the other still vivid present, to times before and in between... Sometimes her chapter dates give you an indication where we are, often, though, she relies on the reader to figure out where Helen's mind is at that moment. And, with a bit of reading into the novel, you do.
Moore has a subtle and compassionate way to convey her character's story. At times, her writing structure reminded me of a puzzle, where, unexpectedly, one small 'piece', be it somebody's gesture or the colour of the ocean on a misty night, connects several until then unconnected images and a broader perspective falls into place. Overall, this is a beautifully developed and affecting story, set in a broader context that is relevant as much today as it was then. Some of the side stories seem to be more than complementing the central story and distracted to some degree. The novel's ending may not be to everybody's liking, but these, in the end, are minor irritants.
July 23, 2017
I really connected with this story, the writing was fantastic and I was completely drawn in.
June 10, 2013
In February Lisa Moore drives me to distraction with her dialog. No one has conversations. Words are just launching pads to daytime reveries and thoughtful meanderings.
"That'll stain if you don't get at it."
Helen loved her kids. Maybe John best of all. He was far flung and wide ranging ...and here follows a page and a half recounting of a failed attempt to put together a crib and a story of a dog running in the wet sand.
"Maybe a little water will set it right."
Another page and a half likely shot through with rich metaphor and deeply layered meaning that I read as a "buying groceries is hard"
I would read the hell out of a Lisa Moore short story. She could write about a mother walking with her son through winter snow. She would capture the way the light hits the snow, flattening the shadows and it would be so damn Canadian I swear I'd be able to hear the Hinterland Who's Who theme.
With an entire book I find myself admiring individual pages beautifully rendered but finding the ending to simply be the absence of additional pages to read.
"That'll stain if you don't get at it."
Helen loved her kids. Maybe John best of all. He was far flung and wide ranging ...and here follows a page and a half recounting of a failed attempt to put together a crib and a story of a dog running in the wet sand.
"Maybe a little water will set it right."
Another page and a half likely shot through with rich metaphor and deeply layered meaning that I read as a "buying groceries is hard"
I would read the hell out of a Lisa Moore short story. She could write about a mother walking with her son through winter snow. She would capture the way the light hits the snow, flattening the shadows and it would be so damn Canadian I swear I'd be able to hear the Hinterland Who's Who theme.
With an entire book I find myself admiring individual pages beautifully rendered but finding the ending to simply be the absence of additional pages to read.
May 22, 2009
FEBRUARY is a story of real people - people who love, laugh, argue,
shop at WalMart and Value Village and raise their children in the best
way that they know how.
FEBRUARY is also a story of loss and grief - grief that is not of the
moment, but rather of the decades. It is the story of three
generations: Helen O*Mara and her husband Cal who perished with the
Ocean Ranger, their four children - John, Cathy, Lulu and Gabrielle -
and their children.
The novel has a complex structure where the past and present blend -
sometimes within a single sentence. The past, the sinking of the Ocean
Ranger in 1984, continually intrudes upon the present as Helen lives her
life under a cloud of grief and survivor guilt.
But Lisa Moore does not allow her characters to wallow in their grief
nor does her book at any time descend into sentimentality. Her
characters are tough as befits the reputation of Newfoundlanders. Helen
O*Mara and her children work through their daily battles and emerge
stronger human beings.
This is a wonderful book of courage and sacrifice. The reader will come
away from it with a renewed sense of hope and faith in the future.
shop at WalMart and Value Village and raise their children in the best
way that they know how.
FEBRUARY is also a story of loss and grief - grief that is not of the
moment, but rather of the decades. It is the story of three
generations: Helen O*Mara and her husband Cal who perished with the
Ocean Ranger, their four children - John, Cathy, Lulu and Gabrielle -
and their children.
The novel has a complex structure where the past and present blend -
sometimes within a single sentence. The past, the sinking of the Ocean
Ranger in 1984, continually intrudes upon the present as Helen lives her
life under a cloud of grief and survivor guilt.
But Lisa Moore does not allow her characters to wallow in their grief
nor does her book at any time descend into sentimentality. Her
characters are tough as befits the reputation of Newfoundlanders. Helen
O*Mara and her children work through their daily battles and emerge
stronger human beings.
This is a wonderful book of courage and sacrifice. The reader will come
away from it with a renewed sense of hope and faith in the future.
March 1, 2013
This book sucked the life out of me. It took me a long long time to read, because I just couldn't get into it. No plot, no excitement, no real character development. Her husband dies, its hard, she raises her kids, she is lonely, she thinks about him a lot. There...now you don't need to read it, you know what happens.
December 9, 2025
Helen is a widow living in St. John's, Newfoundland. Her husband Cal died in 1982 when the Ocean Ranger oil rig sank during a storm, leaving her to raise their four children alone. She struggles with grief while working multiple jobs and taking care of her kids. Cal appears to her in flashbacks: their courtship, marriage, his departure for the rig. We also view her children’s lives at significant milestones in their lives.
It is written in a quasi-stream-of-consciousness. The storyline moves between past and present, in a fragmented fashion, from 1982 to 2008. I presume this method is intended to reflect the way memories come to us at random moments. These short sections frequently jump between time periods, which means the reader must piece together the chronology.
The novel is about long-lasting grief. It is a fictionalized version of a real event. Helen's grief never stops and becomes incorporated into her daily routines. One of my personal issues with books is fragmented storytelling. I much prefer narratives that flow seamlessly, but I can understand the reason the author chose it. It is a nicely written book, and ending is well crafted.
It is written in a quasi-stream-of-consciousness. The storyline moves between past and present, in a fragmented fashion, from 1982 to 2008. I presume this method is intended to reflect the way memories come to us at random moments. These short sections frequently jump between time periods, which means the reader must piece together the chronology.
The novel is about long-lasting grief. It is a fictionalized version of a real event. Helen's grief never stops and becomes incorporated into her daily routines. One of my personal issues with books is fragmented storytelling. I much prefer narratives that flow seamlessly, but I can understand the reason the author chose it. It is a nicely written book, and ending is well crafted.
June 26, 2017
I don't remember the sinking of the Ocean Ranger off Newfoundland in 1982, but I was only 14 at the time (such a self-involved age). I had, just the year before, gone on a band exchange with a girl from St. John's, and she and her family were warm and funny and generous people. They didn't seem to have that much, but as they drove me around, proudly showing off the city that they loved, it was apparent that they had everything that mattered. With this frame of reference, I should really have been more aware of this real life disaster, and it may have been within this frame of reference that I found myself sobbing, barely able to read the words through the tears, at several points as I read this book.
Although you know pretty much right away that Helen loses her husband Cal in the disaster, when this scene happens, I could barely get through it:
I wish I had the room to copy out every scene referring to Helen's loss, because they were touching and brutal and beautiful and relentless-- I think relentless is the most appropriate adjective because, although I have never suffered this kind of a loss, I can imagine that it is the unrelenting nature of grief that most debilitates a person; the moments when you have forgotten to remember that central loss, some rare moment of peace, when suddenly, wham, it all comes flooding back, fresh and horrifying, and conveying that experience is what Lisa Moore achieves in February.
In addition to the story, the themes, that overwhelmed me while reading this book, I was also astounded by the craftsmanship of the writing. The beautiful turns of phrase, the nimble interspersing of present and past, even the use of colons and semi-colons made me stop and marvel at their inclusion-- making me wonder if they were used in specific places simply to make me go back to parse why they had been placed in exactly the place they sat, rereading key phrases, as though the author knew she would be forcing me to pay closer attention. I was also stunned by several small scenes that so perfectly described a mundane type experience that I had to reread them, just to see how Moore had achieved such simple perfection. An example of what I mean:
More personally, as the mother of girls, I could identify with the following passage, and am encouraged that I will survive the natural loss of them from my everyday life:
This is my first 5 star book of 2013, and it earns every stellated point of it. A work of perfection, not least of all, because it made me feel.
Although you know pretty much right away that Helen loses her husband Cal in the disaster, when this scene happens, I could barely get through it:
I wish I had the room to copy out every scene referring to Helen's loss, because they were touching and brutal and beautiful and relentless-- I think relentless is the most appropriate adjective because, although I have never suffered this kind of a loss, I can imagine that it is the unrelenting nature of grief that most debilitates a person; the moments when you have forgotten to remember that central loss, some rare moment of peace, when suddenly, wham, it all comes flooding back, fresh and horrifying, and conveying that experience is what Lisa Moore achieves in February.
In addition to the story, the themes, that overwhelmed me while reading this book, I was also astounded by the craftsmanship of the writing. The beautiful turns of phrase, the nimble interspersing of present and past, even the use of colons and semi-colons made me stop and marvel at their inclusion-- making me wonder if they were used in specific places simply to make me go back to parse why they had been placed in exactly the place they sat, rereading key phrases, as though the author knew she would be forcing me to pay closer attention. I was also stunned by several small scenes that so perfectly described a mundane type experience that I had to reread them, just to see how Moore had achieved such simple perfection. An example of what I mean:
More personally, as the mother of girls, I could identify with the following passage, and am encouraged that I will survive the natural loss of them from my everyday life:
This is my first 5 star book of 2013, and it earns every stellated point of it. A work of perfection, not least of all, because it made me feel.
March 29, 2014
This novel follows the life of a fictitious O'Mara family whose husband/father (Cal) was lost in the Ocean Ranger tragedy of 1982. The majority of the novel is from the perspective of the widow (Helen), but some of it is from the perspective of the son. The story of this family is quite compelling, and it draws you in.
I really wanted to like this book, but I just couldn't get past the writing style. I'd pick it up, suffer through a chapter or two, and then leave it on the bedside table for another week before I had the mental fortitude to pick it up again. I found that the author chose two elements which, although I somewhat understand the reasoning for doing so, I found very distracting from the story itself.
Firstly, the author flits back and forth in time. In one chapter, it's the near-present day. Then it's the 70's, then the near-present day, then the 90's, then the 80's, then back to the near-present day. And so on, and so on. Only the very last chapter is the actual present day. This style gives you the general impression that you're just following Helen's conciousness as it meanders through time. She remembers little vignettes of how she and Cal met, various snippets of their children growing up, segments following the aftermath of the disaster on the rig, and longer moments of how's she's coping on her own now that all her children have grown up and moved out. I could see no rhyme or reason to the sequence of the flashbacks, and it didn't flow well.
Secondly, the writing is very casual. There are no quotations to separate speech from thought from narration. It usually only became clear after you finished the sentence or paragraph whether it was something the main character said, or saw, or heard, or thought. The narration is also overly colloquial, using fantastic traditional Newfoundland syntax and diction. Again, this gives the impression that you're just following Helen's conciousness and memories, as opposed to witnessing the events themselves.
While both of these elements do give it a more personal feel - it almost feels as if Helen is just telling you her life story in whichever order the various elements drift to the forefront of her mind - I found it very disjointed and unnecessarily gimmicky.
I can appreciate that other readers of a more literary persuasion have thoroughly enjoyed this book, and it no doubt deserves all the accolades that it received, but February was not really my cup of tea.
I really wanted to like this book, but I just couldn't get past the writing style. I'd pick it up, suffer through a chapter or two, and then leave it on the bedside table for another week before I had the mental fortitude to pick it up again. I found that the author chose two elements which, although I somewhat understand the reasoning for doing so, I found very distracting from the story itself.
Firstly, the author flits back and forth in time. In one chapter, it's the near-present day. Then it's the 70's, then the near-present day, then the 90's, then the 80's, then back to the near-present day. And so on, and so on. Only the very last chapter is the actual present day. This style gives you the general impression that you're just following Helen's conciousness as it meanders through time. She remembers little vignettes of how she and Cal met, various snippets of their children growing up, segments following the aftermath of the disaster on the rig, and longer moments of how's she's coping on her own now that all her children have grown up and moved out. I could see no rhyme or reason to the sequence of the flashbacks, and it didn't flow well.
Secondly, the writing is very casual. There are no quotations to separate speech from thought from narration. It usually only became clear after you finished the sentence or paragraph whether it was something the main character said, or saw, or heard, or thought. The narration is also overly colloquial, using fantastic traditional Newfoundland syntax and diction. Again, this gives the impression that you're just following Helen's conciousness and memories, as opposed to witnessing the events themselves.
While both of these elements do give it a more personal feel - it almost feels as if Helen is just telling you her life story in whichever order the various elements drift to the forefront of her mind - I found it very disjointed and unnecessarily gimmicky.
I can appreciate that other readers of a more literary persuasion have thoroughly enjoyed this book, and it no doubt deserves all the accolades that it received, but February was not really my cup of tea.
February 22, 2016
I am an unabashed fangirl for all things Newfoundland (fussy weather, knitting traditions, and a diet of rum, potatoes, and bologna? Marry me Newfoundland!) and when I'm Queen everyone will have to visit St. John's at least once. I loved this book and I hope more people read it.
February caught my attention before it was nominated for Canada Reads in 2013. I'm sorry It took me so long to read it. It's a sweet story of family who lost their patriarch, Cal, when the Ocean's Ranger sunk in 1982.
I think the metaphor Moore creates among the O'Mara family parallels Newfoundland economic recovery apres-Crosby. John, the only son goes to Fort MacMurray to build a career in Oil and Gas (specifically Non Destructive Testing, which you can study online at SAIT! A link is below!) and the sub-tragedy of Newfoundland culture being siphoned away by the west. Moore's story is one of hope and how the family eventually puts itself together again, perhaps like Newfoundland has since the collapse of the cod fishery. It's really lovely and I looked forward to coming home to this book everyday.
I have memories of seeing Knowlton Nash explaining the news - that the North Sea had swallowed the Ocean Ranger and the poor 84 souls on board in the middle of the night on Valentine's Day. Such a tragedy - those poor families. The Ocean Ranger was Canada's worst disaster at sea since WW2.
As an aside, I thought I had read that Allan Hawco has bought the rights to turn February into a film. I was mistaken - it was Lisa Moore's Caught. I do hope someone shares this story and turns February into a film, and I hope that they cast Ryan Gosling as Cal.
The Science of the Ocean Ranger: https://youtu.be/hxyCpoyikrw
Found Photos of life on Ocean Ranger http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoun...
Non-Destructive Testing http://www.sait.ca/programs-and-cours...
Book 4 of 17 in 2016
February caught my attention before it was nominated for Canada Reads in 2013. I'm sorry It took me so long to read it. It's a sweet story of family who lost their patriarch, Cal, when the Ocean's Ranger sunk in 1982.
I think the metaphor Moore creates among the O'Mara family parallels Newfoundland economic recovery apres-Crosby. John, the only son goes to Fort MacMurray to build a career in Oil and Gas (specifically Non Destructive Testing, which you can study online at SAIT! A link is below!) and the sub-tragedy of Newfoundland culture being siphoned away by the west. Moore's story is one of hope and how the family eventually puts itself together again, perhaps like Newfoundland has since the collapse of the cod fishery. It's really lovely and I looked forward to coming home to this book everyday.
I have memories of seeing Knowlton Nash explaining the news - that the North Sea had swallowed the Ocean Ranger and the poor 84 souls on board in the middle of the night on Valentine's Day. Such a tragedy - those poor families. The Ocean Ranger was Canada's worst disaster at sea since WW2.
As an aside, I thought I had read that Allan Hawco has bought the rights to turn February into a film. I was mistaken - it was Lisa Moore's Caught. I do hope someone shares this story and turns February into a film, and I hope that they cast Ryan Gosling as Cal.
The Science of the Ocean Ranger: https://youtu.be/hxyCpoyikrw
Found Photos of life on Ocean Ranger http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoun...
Non-Destructive Testing http://www.sait.ca/programs-and-cours...
Book 4 of 17 in 2016
June 14, 2013
This story swept me away and touched me very deeply. It was chosen as a Canada Reads selection by CBC radio and that was why I picked it up.
As a Canadian in my fifties, of course I remember when the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank in 1982. This book takes the tragedy to the personal level and examines the subsequent life of a widow who is left to raise her four children after her husband dies.
Moore describes loneliness: "She is as alone and cold and obdurately dull as the tree in her backyard, as the fender of a car under the street light, as the apple in the bowl on the kitchen table, as the church across the street, as the steeple covered on one side with snow; she is not Helen, and who is Helen?"
She describes the husband's death: "When the wall closes over Cal, he will be like a fly in amber, a riddle of time, a museum piece. He will lose the desire for escape. The obsession with living will seem like a dalliance to him then. Stillness will be the new thing."
The experience of trying to date again: "There had been a hole in the centre of the dining room and all the things a man and woman could say to each other had dropped into the hole, and it had closed over, and the new hardwood floor gleamed shiny and mute."
I hope these quotes show in some degree the magnificance of Moore's writing and her ability to make you feel, and see, and understand. Canada read this book. I read this book. Maybe you should read it, too.
As a Canadian in my fifties, of course I remember when the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank in 1982. This book takes the tragedy to the personal level and examines the subsequent life of a widow who is left to raise her four children after her husband dies.
Moore describes loneliness: "She is as alone and cold and obdurately dull as the tree in her backyard, as the fender of a car under the street light, as the apple in the bowl on the kitchen table, as the church across the street, as the steeple covered on one side with snow; she is not Helen, and who is Helen?"
She describes the husband's death: "When the wall closes over Cal, he will be like a fly in amber, a riddle of time, a museum piece. He will lose the desire for escape. The obsession with living will seem like a dalliance to him then. Stillness will be the new thing."
The experience of trying to date again: "There had been a hole in the centre of the dining room and all the things a man and woman could say to each other had dropped into the hole, and it had closed over, and the new hardwood floor gleamed shiny and mute."
I hope these quotes show in some degree the magnificance of Moore's writing and her ability to make you feel, and see, and understand. Canada read this book. I read this book. Maybe you should read it, too.
March 6, 2023
Loved the overall sadness of the book, hated the writing style with burning passion.
The lack of quotation marks got on my nerves quite quickly when I started to not understand if the character was talking to someone, to themselves or just thinking about something. I get the reason for it, but unfortunately it was not my cup of tea.
The lack of quotation marks got on my nerves quite quickly when I started to not understand if the character was talking to someone, to themselves or just thinking about something. I get the reason for it, but unfortunately it was not my cup of tea.
July 3, 2013
review to follow.
February 20, 2023
I'm at a loss for what to say on this one... I thought I was picking up a book about an oil rig sinking in the 1980's and how the wife managed her grief after her husband was killed but this feels like so much more than that. I mean... Yes, Helen's husband is one of the people killed on the Ocean Ranger when it sinks. And yes, we follow her through her grief, but the grief isn't written how it usually is, as crying and emotional outbursts. Its a hollow grief, an isolation from the world while being trapped in your memory. The reader is given these snapshots of Helen's life; from the mundane everyday scenes, to the life altering moments that come when least expected. She carries on with a resiliency that can probably only be found in a person who has four children that rely on them for everything. Lisa Moore transports you into Helen's head and makes you feel all of the things. The early days of marriage, the heartbreak of losing that love, the struggle of surviving the grief, the challenges of raising four kids alone, the attempts to re-enter the world, and the solitude of living alone when the roller coaster finally stops. This is an incredible work of fiction, but it reads like an actual persons life. I enjoyed this book and wish I could describe how it made me feel better than this...
March 9, 2011
Lisa Moore’s ‘February’ is not unlike listening to a particularly evocative piece of music. Each sentence is exquisitely composed with exact, appropriate words lined up in the perfect order. Her writing is beautiful on the reader's "ear" so to speak, and the images it calls forth are vivid and detailed. The novel has no particular sequenced narrative but repeatedly takes the reader from era to era, and back again, in protagonist, Helen Omara’s life before and after the death of her husband, a victim of the sinking of an oil rig, Ocean Ranger, off the coast of Newfoundland. Moores's device unfolds as a sequence of sharply defined scenes and deeply felt experiences from one family’s world. As such it builds up a powerful impression of what it must be like to be Helen, with minute details of her exterior world and tremendously moving passages that bear witness to her rich but harrowing interior world.
There were times when I became perhaps a little too aware of the writing craft. Does that mean that Moore’s brilliance is too self-conscious? Maybe, but it’s a small quibble. I also sometimes found parts too repetitive — the same thought or event described several different ways — which was doubtless purposefully wrought, but almost made me skim over a paragraph or two. I never did, which is a testament to the leeway one is prepared to give to such a marvelous writer. Or, as Richard Ford, describes her on the cover of the book, “An astonishing writer.”
I thought the last section made for a remarkably powerful ending to the book, one of the best “conclusions” I’ve ever encountered. If the book had been a lesser one it would have been worth reading for those last paragraphs. But, as it is, ‘February’ is worth reading for almost every single sentence.
There were times when I became perhaps a little too aware of the writing craft. Does that mean that Moore’s brilliance is too self-conscious? Maybe, but it’s a small quibble. I also sometimes found parts too repetitive — the same thought or event described several different ways — which was doubtless purposefully wrought, but almost made me skim over a paragraph or two. I never did, which is a testament to the leeway one is prepared to give to such a marvelous writer. Or, as Richard Ford, describes her on the cover of the book, “An astonishing writer.”
I thought the last section made for a remarkably powerful ending to the book, one of the best “conclusions” I’ve ever encountered. If the book had been a lesser one it would have been worth reading for those last paragraphs. But, as it is, ‘February’ is worth reading for almost every single sentence.
May 2, 2010
I may have rated this book more highly had she not used the strange chapter jumps or whatever they may be called. I can't help but think it is an author weakness to do so as unable to maintain a narrative momentum otherwise. I am now reading her 2005 novel Alligator so may be unfair to compare. Although it also jumps between separate characters, repeatedly. Am only just started and may sign off without finishing if it is too annoying. There are too many good books to read without convincing myself to read one slightly irritating structurally.
I really thought her thoughts regarding death, survival of death or after a loved one's death were original, interesting, and believable. She was able to develop John as a character in addition to Helen, and all this despite the jumping back and forth between characters and years. I wished she had not done so and felt it would have been a tremendous novel otherwise, but this was a little too distracting to me.
And I absoultely hate this cover- struck a discordant note every time I opened or closed this book. Luckily it was a fast read.
Talk about false advertising- I know it is superficial, but a cover draws me in or repels me, falsely at times. I wonder how many great books I have missed due to unappetizing or offputting covers. Had I not remembered a New Yorker review or maybe a NY Times review mentioning this specific novel, I would not have picked this up in my library, certainly not in paperback .
Oh well.
I really thought her thoughts regarding death, survival of death or after a loved one's death were original, interesting, and believable. She was able to develop John as a character in addition to Helen, and all this despite the jumping back and forth between characters and years. I wished she had not done so and felt it would have been a tremendous novel otherwise, but this was a little too distracting to me.
And I absoultely hate this cover- struck a discordant note every time I opened or closed this book. Luckily it was a fast read.
Talk about false advertising- I know it is superficial, but a cover draws me in or repels me, falsely at times. I wonder how many great books I have missed due to unappetizing or offputting covers. Had I not remembered a New Yorker review or maybe a NY Times review mentioning this specific novel, I would not have picked this up in my library, certainly not in paperback .
Oh well.
April 25, 2021
Had I not found out about February through the CBC's Canada Reads top 40 Canadian books list, it is doubtful that I ever would have picked it up. I'm not much in to slow-paced books without a strong storyline or intense characters. But, because of its rave reviews, and an understanding that it is important to break custom once in a while, I gave it a go. Although I'm not likely to recommend it to anyone that is not grieving a profound loss, I'd say I still enjoyed certain elements of the story.
At its core this is a story about bereavement, and how the occurrence of bad weather and senseless errors can turn a life upside down. Lisa Moore’s depictions of feeling ‘outside’ of the reality that continues to plug on in the aftermath of tragedy, how loneliness or flashbacks to happy times can pull you away from the surface and hold you hostage deep in your mind, will leave anyone who hasn’t experienced such loss, with a palpable understanding of its destruction.
The prose can be choppy and the narrative disjointed, as it skips back and forth between past and present, but if you're patient you'll find the flow. All in all, there were times when I found the story repetitive and exhausting, but I soldiered through in a few sittings, and by the end I was glad that I had read it.
At its core this is a story about bereavement, and how the occurrence of bad weather and senseless errors can turn a life upside down. Lisa Moore’s depictions of feeling ‘outside’ of the reality that continues to plug on in the aftermath of tragedy, how loneliness or flashbacks to happy times can pull you away from the surface and hold you hostage deep in your mind, will leave anyone who hasn’t experienced such loss, with a palpable understanding of its destruction.
The prose can be choppy and the narrative disjointed, as it skips back and forth between past and present, but if you're patient you'll find the flow. All in all, there were times when I found the story repetitive and exhausting, but I soldiered through in a few sittings, and by the end I was glad that I had read it.
March 17, 2013
This book held me prisoner, or should I say captive. Not often (if ever) has one book raised such emotions. It was like the feeling in the pit of your stomach after you have had a good cry, but are still in the throws of the upset.
Helen is 30, has three children and is expecting another baby but is not aware of it yet. Her husband died in an terrible storm while working off the coast of Newfoundland.
The writing is uniquely different. I couldn't place it at first, but I think you might say "eastern Canada". Its beautiful and it takes you right away into a different world and culture, which you become part of. You are with Helen, and her sister Louise, every step of the way.
Helen is 30, has three children and is expecting another baby but is not aware of it yet. Her husband died in an terrible storm while working off the coast of Newfoundland.
The writing is uniquely different. I couldn't place it at first, but I think you might say "eastern Canada". Its beautiful and it takes you right away into a different world and culture, which you become part of. You are with Helen, and her sister Louise, every step of the way.
February 23, 2010
A story of Helen whose husband is killed in a rigging accident and how she raises her 4 children alone - great characters. Throughout the story, Helen keeps going over and over in her mind what might have been her husband's last moments. Really resonates with all the loses we have been touched by since 9/11.
May 6, 2013
This book was beautifully written and I'm always happy to read a book set in Newfoundland. Having said that, there was something about the story that felt a bit flat. I enjoyed reading it but did not love it.
May 2, 2018
In ‘February’ we follow Helen at various points in her life. We see her in the present, in her role as grandmother, as a young woman and as a wife whose husband is one of the many killed when the oil rig he is working on collapses.
It felt like rummaging through one of those memory boxes. Some recollections were more vivid than others, but they combine to form a picture of one woman and her life.
What was evident throughout this story is that Helen is not, in many ways, a remarkable woman. She lives her life and deals with what life throws at her with stoicism, but throughout we are given a picture of resilience and strength.
This is not a fast-moving story, rather ideas are unravelled and we slowly come to understand this character.
It felt like rummaging through one of those memory boxes. Some recollections were more vivid than others, but they combine to form a picture of one woman and her life.
What was evident throughout this story is that Helen is not, in many ways, a remarkable woman. She lives her life and deals with what life throws at her with stoicism, but throughout we are given a picture of resilience and strength.
This is not a fast-moving story, rather ideas are unravelled and we slowly come to understand this character.
August 16, 2017
I love Lisa Moore's writing. Her prose is stunning. But it's funny--so many of the characters are so clearly defined in this book, I could almost reach out and touch them. Like Barry. But Helen...I find her hard to wrap my head around, and I don't feel like I ever really got to know her. Still, great read.
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