Brown Eyes Blue

At last, thanks to Carolyn Meyer and her remarkable first adult novel Brown Eyes Blue, we have a poignant, pithy story, rife with recognizable relationships among women spanning three generations, where the heroines are not all under forty with violet eyes. In fact, arguably my favorite character is Lavinia, an artist in her eighties who is scandalizing both family and community in her sleepy Pennsylvania town by her switch from painting bucolic country scenes to bringing naked men to life in full frontal view.My five children grew up reading Meyer's award winning books for pre-teens and teens (she's written forty nine of them), and I read them through the years to keep pace with my kids developing knowledge of powerful women in the pantheon of world history. Meyer's many works on famous queens contributed to my daughters' belief that they could be anything they wanted to be and tweaked their imaginations as they donned regal garb to present plays in the garage and relegated their two brothers to playing their courtiers and jesters.Now at last, Meyer has brought her vivid characterizations to life in a novel for me. In Brown Eyes Blue, through Lavinia, Dorcas, and Sasha, Meyer presents the difficult, often daunting, three generational family sandwich so many of us have lived through or are living. Dorcas, in her mid-fifties and struggling with her own dramatic change of life issues of career and romance, is caught off balance between an outspoken and hypercritical elderly mother who is showing signs of senility and a needy, twenty-something daughter whom Dorcas thought was safely launched into adulthood but who arrives back on mom's doorstep, seemingly the same troubled teenager who left home several years before. As with her children's books, Meyer's novel is spare with overblown description that bogs you down but rich with metaphor and realistic dialogue that takes you there. As someone who was once a Sasha, who has very recently played the role of Dorcas and who one day can only hope to be as colorful and entertaining as Lavinia, I feel highly qualified to recommend Brown Eyes Blue to other avid readers of fiction. It's a wonderful read and one can only hope that Carolyn Meyer is at work on her sequel.

Brown Eyes Blue is a wonderful book about the relationships that women have....with other women, with men, and with themselves. It made me think about the choices I have made in life, my expectations regarding romance and the times I have sold myself short. The characters are wonderful! This is the perfect book for a book club to read and discuss. I strongly recommend it.