Gaining Ground was referred to me by another avid reader. It’s a forgotten novel, no longer in print but available from Amazon sellers. I’m so glad I found it. The story focuses on the essence of femaleness: motherhood. Leaving her daughter behind, our heroine lives for fifteen years alone in a cabin in the woods in what can only be described in today’s vernacular as mindfulness. Not Thoreau, as she rarely analyzes her own actions. She lives. Peacefully and quietly. We never know for certain what it is that propels her, but we glimpse her discomfort with modern society and suspect a diagnosis – in the world she left behind, she might be labeled anxious or paranoid – but we see only that she takes in her environs with extreme sensitivity. She hears and smells more acutely, she feels deeply without rationalization. A buddhist without label, empathic to the point that she feels too deeply and thus suffers for others. A woman who needs to be alone, who is suddenly confronted by the daughter she left behind, with her daughter’s justifiable anger and confusion. Can she turn her back on her again? Who is the saner woman? This is a very good novel for those who wish to explore such themes, and extremely well told.
( Courtesy of Randy Kraft, 199 pages )