The Magic of Ordinary Days

From Publishers Weekly
This is the first adult novel by an author who has written two well-received YA books. Livvy Dunne is a thoughtful 24-year-old with yearnings toward archeology, who in a rash moment in WWII Colorado becomes pregnant by a dashing officer and is forced into a marriage of convenience by her sternly puritanical minister father. She goes off to Ray Singleton's remote farm knowing nothing about him except that he is lonely, utterly inexperienced around women and touchingly devoted to her. The relationship between the two, graced by some delicate, perceptive and fine-boned writing, is at the heart of the book, and Creel gets it all just right. She is also skilled at evoking the peculiar remoteness from the war of the high plains country, where farmers were regarded as an integral part of the war effort and even got enough gas to drive around for pleasure, a rare privilege in 1944. Lonesome Livvy yearns for more communicative companionship, however, and grows close to a pair of charming Nisei sisters at an internment camp and this is where plot devices begin to play an unwarranted role. For Rose and Lorelei, it turns out, will do anything for love and involve Livvy in what develops into a dangerous (and inherently improbable) exercise in deceit and manipulation. The book recovers its stride for a poignant if rather hasty finish, but the calm spell cast by the tale of Livvy and Ray, which would have been perfectly satisfactory to maintain the book, has been broken. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


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A YA author's nicely written adult debut novel blends historical richness and a fine sense of place to tell the story of a woman's developing love for her husband—and for his Colorado farmland—over the course of six months in 1944. In wartime Denver, Olivia Dunne becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with a departing American soldier. With the help of a local church, her father arranges her marriage to Ray Singleton, a beet farmer in faraway La Junta. Olivia's first days on the isolated farm are awkward, and Ray, a shy, reticent man of good intentions, isn't very adept at small talk. Precluded from contributing anything useful to the running of the farm, whose harvests are cultivated in part by labor from the local internment camp, Olivia takes long solitary walks. During one of them she meets Rose and Lorelei Umahara, Japanese-Americans from California who have been evacuated to confinement in Colorado. Young, enthusiastic, and passionate about butterfly hunting, the sisters introduce Olivia to the thriving, emotionally rich life of the camp. She keeps her friendship with the girls secret; Ray, whose brother was killed at Pearl Harbor, displays no fondness for the Japanese who work his farm. Creel does a delightful job of evoking first the dreariness of the Singleton farm and Olivia's unnerving loneliness, then the slow ripening of her affection for Ray, a simple but profoundly kind and gentle man. Rose and Lorelei, meanwhile, hint that they have begun dating a pair of American soldiers, and Olivia drives them to meet the men in secret. But the "soldiers" turn out to be German POWs escaping with the help of the sisters, who make Olivia an unwitting accomplice. The authorgives her heroine a satisfying emotional depth, moving Olivia through phases of affection and disappointment with assured confidence before closing with a tranquil scene after the baby is born. A light, precisely observed novel. TV rights to Hallmark Hall of Fame/CBS


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