A Time to Reap
Therese Tappouni
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Whole Heart Publishing
ISBN: 0970550022

Three generations of women struggle with loss to find love & identity.

Maureen Manley, mother of three, begins to unravel as she sends her youngest off to college. Suddenly she's remembering her oldest child's death 17 years earlier. Now she knows she must make peace with this mourning so she can resurrect her passion & her purpose.

From the beginning of time, men have gone on & written about The Quest ... for wholeness, for adventure, for passion & for purpose. Now Therese Tappouni has written the quintessential woman's Quest ... which take us into the realm of emotions & the psyche, as well as the physical.

Eloquent, elegant & entrancing A Time to Reap entices you, like a lullaby or a story told around the cave fire, into the womanly world, where very different things matter, & are resolved in very different ways, for very different reasons.

Within the husk of her empty marriage, Maureen falls apart as her two children head off to college. Jason is content to work & play golf, & harbors old angers & frustrations against his wife, yet offers her sympathy, suggesting Maureen take a vacation & visit her sister out in San Francisco.

Maureen has another motive for visiting her sister, she's enrolled in a retreat for menopausal women in the wilds of Oregon. & as only sisters can, Maureen entraps Lisa by guilt & humor into going with her, & new ways of living open up for them both. Then Lisa must leave to return to work, & Maureen lingers on, re-awakening her acquaintance with Stephen, her first love, who left all those years before, because he didn't want to marry & have children.

Well, things to awry, accidents happen, danger besets Maureen's daughter, bodies are broken, CPR is administered to more than one heart, Jason show his true colors, & new lives are made, with quite a bit of talking, & new philosophies are considered.

I didn't “get” how all the transformations came about as some of the stations along the paths were a bit contrived, however, this is a womanly read, where the “slings & arrows” are those which all women at some stage in their lives must survive. That Maureen's mother is a cliche was disappointing until I remembered that out of the grinding comes the tension. That Jason turned out to be a shallow, racist, sexist a-hole is par for the course, since that's what he wants to spend the rest of his life on ... golf courses.

Having woken up at last, Maureen wants to be in Oregon, with her grandchild & her friends, learning an entirely new way of living, teaching the new things she has learnt.

A Time to Reap is both a moving story of grief & betrayal, as well as a parable of the effort & the causes for awakening from a dead life into a living ceremony.

More from Therese Tappouni:
Walking Your Walk: A Woman's Guide to a Spirit Filled Life
Night Gardening : Passionate Poems for the Beloved
(05/23/04)

Rebecca