Henriette Lazaridis Power

This is the story of Calliope - a woman in search of an anchor, a woman wallowing in her mother's indifference, a woman who uses circumstances around her to justify the inevitability of her aloneness, one really sad lady!

This is also the story of Calliope - a woman surrounded with a great big Greek family, a woman loved and cared for by Jonah, a woman divided between her mother's Greece and her own American homeland.

This is also the story of the fingers of war and the long-term suffering that are held in their grip.

This is a story of existence - of living anyway - of sadness, and happiness, and rebirth and death and families and love and endurance and life.

The story moves between current day Greece as Calliope flies from Boston to sort through her uncle's home - the one that he left for her. Calliope must face her mother, who lives in Greece, as she sorts through the collections of Nestor, the almost hoarder uncle. Clio, Calliope's mom, is distant and distracted, and neglectful and mean. And as Calliope sorts through the strands of life buried in Nestor's house she also discovers the hidden stories her mother only partially told.

But, the reader sees it all. Power moves the telling between Calliope's version in current day and Clio's life in prewar Greece. We see the actual story through Clio's eyes and are able to hold that against the partial truth's that she shares with Calliope.

I liked this story - but even as I read I felt there were more layers that were too hard for Clio to tell even to her all seeing reader. This, made me think again and again of the thousands of versions we tell ourselves of the events that enfold us. This follows a family's fall from great wealth to ruin during an impossible time. And though we feel we are seeing it all as Clio remembers, we aren't. It still holds the romanticized feeling of stories our grandparent's told. Refrains we know and can repeat along with them. So reality becomes what we want it to be - not what it really is.

It made me consider again the 'head' talks I have with myself - the things I believe as the truth and how they may or may not be reality.

Very interesting!… (mere)

The Clover House is pretty well written, laid out well and the prose is perfectly serviceable at the very least. However, I just could not make myself truly care about what happened and found myself in the odd position halfway through the book of not really caring whether or not I continued reading. Usually at that point something will either be annoying me (and nothing was) or I will want to finish the journey the author has started me on. I'm not sure if I am just not the right reader for this book, or if it wasn't the right time for me, but I just didn't love this book as I had hoped that I would.… (mere)

From the book synopsis:

"For fans of Victoria Hislop's The Island and Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key, a powerful debut novel about a woman shuttling between America and Greece to solve the mystery surrounding her family's past and claim an identity of her own.

A phone call from her cousin sends Calliope Notaris Brown from Boston to the Greek city of Patras to sort through an inheritance from her uncle. She arrives during the wild abandon of Carnival, when the world is turned upside down and things are not as they seem. Digging through the keepsakes her uncle has left, Callie stumbles upon clues to the wartime disappearance of the family's fortune and to the mystery of her estranged mother's chronic unhappiness. As she pieces together family secrets that stretch back to the Italian occupation of Greece during World War II, Callie's relationship with her fiancé, her mother, and her mother's two sisters will change irrevocably."

While I did enjoy this book, it was a struggle to get through it.

I did find Calliope's mom's story interesting but there was too many things thrown in the mix. It was hard to keep straight.… (mere)