Common Threads

I started my year with resolutions to read more and to write more. I know it sounds weird—a writer needing to resolve to read more and to write more—but due to a life change just before the pandemic, I lost a lot, including the time and interest to read and write. Now it is time to change that. It is time to take back the good things. It is time for restoration.

With those resolutions came actionable goals, including reading a book per month and writing a book review on each one. I got off to a slow start because the first book I chose, The Hundred Year Flood by Matthew Salesses was difficult to read. I could only get through a few pages at a time and imagined writing a scathing review, but I was determined to stick it out. I am glad I did. About halfway through, it turned around and became a page turner.

The Hundred Year Flood occurs shortly after 9/11 and centers on Tee, a Korean who was adopted (or —SPOILER ALERT—so he thinks) by American parents. Tee is a young adult who is uncertain about who he is. He takes a trip to Prague and unexpectedly becomes friends with an artist known as Pavel Picasso, along with his wife, Katka, and his best friend Rockefeller, who had all been quiet, intellectual activists against communism. Pavel and company are heroes in a strange land. Tee is enamored with them and their lifestyle—and he took too much to Katka, with whom he ends up having adulterous relationship that leads to her demise and a traumatic end to his visit to Prague. The book got its name because at the story’s climax, the city, especially the quarter where Tee lived, was decimated by a particularly large and destructive flood, the kind that happens once in a hundred years.

The early chapters flash between Prague and Tee’s hometown, Boston, with scenes including his early childhood, the period closely preceding his trip to Prague, when he was hospitalized and disoriented due to a head injury. Jumping between places and times made the story hard to follow. Near the halfway point, the story became more linear, more focused on present tense activities in Prague, and flashes were clear memories, and I realized the author may have intentionally constructed the early portion in a disjointed fashion to reflect Tee’s disorientation.

The second story was The Keeper of Happy Endings by Barbara Davis. On the surface, it could not be more different from The Hundred Year Flood. The Keeper of Happy Endings tells the parallel stories of Soline Roussel and Aurora “Rory” Grant.

Soline was part of a line of “spell weavers,” women who would custom make wedding dresses with a personal charm, a spell that was written for good fortune and happy ending, sew into a hem for each client—but according to family lore, they were denied their own happy endings. Soline’s mother dies an expected death from a respiratory illness. It was not clear if it was tuberculosis, cancer, or another illness, but it was degenerative. Soline ending up caring for mother in the last portion of her life and used those skills when she ended up volunteering at the American Hospital, where she meets the love of her life, Anson William Purcell, an American Field Service ambulance driver.

The doctor who oversees the hospital, along with Anson, other AFS drivers, and individuals with other specialties, are part of a team that smuggles people who the German’s are seeking, including Allied soldiers and pilots, out of German-occupied Paris. After being detained and interrogated, Anson fears for Soline’s safety, so he pulls strings to have her smuggled out of Paris and taken to his father’s home in Newport. Though Soline was a “good girl,” she and Anson were intimate the night before her departure. Soon after arriving in Newport, two major life changes happen simultaneously. Soline realizes she is pregnant, and a telegram arrives saying that Anson was missing and presumed captured or dead.

Anson’s father kicks Soline out, but “compassionately” sends her to a home for unwed mothers. She has a baby girl who dies (or—SPOILER ALERT—so she believes). The home gets her placed with a job, but as the men start returning from the war jobs, dry up. She makes her way to Boston, and the owner of a French bakery refers her to a tailor who could use help. Soline learned the necessary skills when her mother was teaching her dressmaking. The tailor, Myles “Maddy” Madison, is losing business because a notable person discovered that he was gay, but he takes in Soline anyway and gives Soline the shop when he passes away. Soline makes it into a custom wedding dress shop, like the one her mother had in Paris, until she was making a dress for a Kennedy niece, and a fire gutted the interior of the shop and burned Soline’s hands so that she could no longer sew.

Rory is a young woman who is struggling with depression and her relationship with her mother. She is enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts program and is looking at an internship in France when her fiancé, Matthew “Hux” Huxley, a doctor working with Doctors without Borders, goes missing in South Sudan. She struggles to get out of bed and take care of usual tasks, like washing dishes and doing laundry, and almost exclusively eats takeout and canned soup. Rory is procrastinating on her registering for the next term at school and is not interested in the internship.

Soline and Rory’s paths cross when Rory is drawn to the row house that was once Soline’s shop. She wants to lease it and open an art gallery for undiscovered artists. Rory contacts Soline’s attorney and Soline eventually agrees to the lease, but all arrangements are handled through the attorney. Rory does not meet Soline…until she discovers a mysterious box under the stairs. They arrange to meet so that Rory can return the box to Soline and a friendship begins. When the relationship becomes strained, Rory tries to do something nice that leads to a startling discovery and an unexpected turn of events for Soline, who has had a painful life.

Initially, the stories had nothing in common other than genre (contemporary fiction) and the fact that I got both in Kindle First Reads. They had different authors, were set in different times, and had quite different characters and plots.

But I quickly started seeing commonalities between the two stories. I imagined that they were the result of two different authors getting the same set of writing prompts:

• Boston
• A famous European city
• An international event that changed the world
• Love and loss
• Family
• Artists
• A hidden injury
• A secret about adoption

What would you create with that set of writing prompts?