The Opening
    Susannah Ellis Wilds
  2000 Writers Club Press, Lincoln Nebraska
   ISBN: 0595090818


Louisiana Jones retires early from the world of high-tech & big business & discovers a slip of paper on which she had, upon reading her last year book of high school, written predictions for her circle of friends. When she decides to reconnect with her five friends, she opens a Pandora's box of dreams, memories & unforgiven betrayals.

I'm not from the American South, have lived there only for a couple of months as an adult & I've known only one woman in any depth who was raised in the Georgia. Having said that Susannah Wilds' The Opening has a universal appeal to women. We've all attended school, made & lost friends, suffered the slings & arrows of sexual stigmas, ill-health & ugliness. We've all had dreams, been told there's a standard by which good girls should live & bad girls will pay. We've all played games both party & personal & we've all been boy crazy, well, nearly all of us!

Back to The Opening: six girls coming of age at the height of the Cold War, at the end of the '50s & before the Age of Aquarius sprung a leak. They are girls being taught to be "good", to be conforming, to be carefree. Their mothers & fathers are as ordinary & heroic as anyone's & their childhoods have the same degrees of trauma & charm as anyone's, in Susannah Wilds' hands they become magical. The girls are taught to expect they'll go on to college, find a husband, settle down, have children & live lives their mothers did.

Things did not work out quite like that & when Lucy starts the hunt to reconnect with Sally, Bobbie Jean, Becca, Wallee & Millie she also begins to have a dream that had haunted her at puberty. This time, however, it has an ominous cast.

There are poems to each chapter of this lively book all centering around Rudyard Kipling's famous If. A poem, by the way, I too had to memorize as a youngster. The girls took that poem seriously & in their time, a time before feminism, it never occurred to them to question why girls should know about a poem that instructs boys on how to be men & sons. Neither did I although I was disappointed that daughters were of no consequence in the great author's writings.

And that's the crux of this story: how each girl grew to womanhood, walked into walls of agony in relationships, stumbled through years of despair until grabbing onto their own lives & striding out into their own sunshine instead of the light reflected from their husbands.

I deeply enjoyed Susannah Wilds' The Opening - I like the way she's told the story through each woman's memories; through poems; through reaction to predictions made thirty years before; even to the suspense that builds up to when the six are together again at the seashore just like the last time they'd all been together, well, not exactly!

This is a must-read book! I recommend it for reading groups, it will get your juices going!

This first time author mailed me her pre-release copy complete with errata sheet & ebullient letter. Sight unseen, I engaged with her for an Interview, do check it out, Susannah is an exuberant & articulate interviewee!
(06/11/00)

Rebecca