In this post, I’m giving the floor to those who have been kind enough to write about my novel since publication day. These literary sommeliers genuinely love books. Their engagement is a safety net for authors and a fantastic resource for readers. If you follow them, you will be rewarded with great insights and recommendations.
The book reviewers and cultural voices in question are Linda Hill of Linda’s Book Bag, Cathy Brown of 746 Books, Susan Osborne of A Life in Books, Madame Bibliophile Recommends and Zürich-based Rafaël Newman.
The highest praise came from Linda’s Book Bag review. I’m amazed and extremely grateful for Linda’s generous review. “Before the Leaves Fall is magnificent. It’s one of those quiet books that permeates the reader’s soul and ensures an indelible impact. I adored it.”
“A book about a person – Margrit – deciding that they wish to die before the autumn, thereby avoiding yet another winter, perhaps sounds grim and unappealing. Before the Leaves Fall, however, is absolutely not depressing and miserable. Instead, it is a beautifully written insight into humanity, our flaws and the means to atone and come to terms with both ourselves and others. Not a single word is wasted in this exquisite narrative.”
And I was truly honoured by Cathy Brown’s review on 746 Books. Cathy runs several popular reading and reviewing initiatives on her blog such as Reading Ireland Month and Novellas in November.
“Clare O’Dea’s Before the Leaves Fall is one of those quietly affecting novels that seems modest on the surface but grows richer with every chapter. Like Voting Day, her debut, it shines a gentle light on the unnoticed corners of people’s lives, and although it’s not a direct sequel, it carries that same emotional intelligence and sense of humanity that made her debut so impressive and features one of the same characters, now at a later stage in her life.”
A Life in Books blog has been a fantastic source of recommendations for me over the years, which makes it all the more special that Susan has given Before the Leaves Fall her seal of approval in this review.
“This could very easily have become one of those issue-led novels with two-dimensional characters there to make a point but O’Dea neatly dodges that, exploring the complexities of both Ruedi and Margrit’s lives. The narrative alternates between the two, both engaging characters who change over the course of the summer. … I enjoyed this brief, moving and humane novella with its depiction of a choice made without duress, eased by an empathetic character who learns much from the experience of facilitating that choice.”
In her dual review of Before the Leaves Fall and Voting Day, Madame Bibliophile Recommends picked up on the gaps in communication within families, which so often leads to resentment and misunderstanding.
“Before the Leaves Fall follows the developing friendship between Margrit and Ruedi, as they both reflect on seemingly uneventful lives and how well these have been lived, as well as what living there is left to do. It’s deeply moving in its portrayal of how we hurt the ones we love and how insurmountable gaps in communication can seem.
As different relationships grow and develop through Before the Leaves Fall, they are evoked with compassion but without sentimentality.”
And finally, in his essay for 3 Quarks Daily, The Written Voice, Rafaël Newman finds special significance in Margrit’s own writings in the ‘life audit’ notebook gifted to her by Ruedi. Initially I had my doubts about this part of the storytelling but my editor was in favour of it. It did allow me to capture Margrit’s voice as vividly as possible.
“And as her initially cursory notes on the various decades of her life grow into something richer, as recollections of chance encounters become vignettes with a profound philosophical resonance, Margrit’s resolve is strengthened: not necessarily in the binary particulars of her decision—whether or not to end her life, which remains unknown until the novel’s conclusion—but in her assumption of a more generalized agency. An agency in which her own memory, her own will, and her own perspective are central.”
Rafaël Newman also analysed Voting Day in this essay about voting in Switzerland, and I’m very grateful to him for exploring the themes of my novels in such depth. All these contributions help rescue the work from potential oblivion and make the rewards outweigh the risks. If you’d like to support Before the Leaves Fall, I’d be happy to see more reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. Every mention and every star counts in keeping the book afloat.
I’d like to finish with one more paragraph from the 746 Books review: “Before the Leaves Fall ultimately becomes a story about acceptance and about facing the choices that we have made in life with a clear eye and an open heart. It is compassionate, finely observed, and deeply humane and a lovely companion to Voting Day.”
Clare O'Dea 