And Give You Peace

By Jessica Treadway

Book Overview

How do you survive when the desperate action of a loved one has shattered your family? In And Give You Peace , a young woman, Anastasia Dolarn, courageously examines her seemingly normal childhood to uncover the motivations behind an unspeakable tragedy. Jessica Treadway flawlessly portrays the complexity of human experience in the face of incomprehensible loss, revealing yet again why the New York Times Book Review has called her "a writer with an unsparing bent for the truth."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555973159
• ISBN13: 9781555973155
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful

AND GIVE YOU PEACE is the most memorable novel about family that I've read in years. It is full of wisdom, sadness, and truth. I ached for the main character, who seeks redemption in the face of unimaginable loss. The author's generous vision and sumptuous writing make this book a keeper, one to share with others who enjoy the transformative and life-affirming power of great fiction. Wow!

Truth and Memory

So many authors like to spike their book with horrific tragedy as a hook, the better to reel us in and fascinate us. What I admire about And Give You Peace is that Treadway is more interested with bookending such event, showing us the family portrait before and after it was ripped to shreds, and the small and mundane ways in which define ourselves, and our families, and how those memories serve or trap us when we necessarily try to put a life together again. This novel sneaks in and whallops you with control and subtlety which will leave you stunned and, undoubtedly,impressed.

Wealth and Range of Emotion with Anastasia

I read "And Give You Peace" with excruciating wonder. It's a gorgeous amalgamation of pain, humor, tenderness, insanity, vulnerability, strength and finally wisdom. This outstanding sort of fusion is made possible by a remarkable narrator, one that fills the book with a solidly authoritative, yet damaged and world weary voice. The clarity and precision with which Anastasia, the book's narrator, tells her story produced in me a trust that lasted the entirety of the book. There are no "cheap shots" here, nothing comes easy. The relationships within the family are written with a subtlety that charmes: a look here, a glance there, an emotion unsaid. It's refreshing to read into characters with a reader's imagination without the forced focus of overbearing prose. Treadway's style allows your imagination to be an anonymous character in the book, something that allowed me to cherish the book even more. The pages of "And Give You Peace" pulsate with a vitality that Anastasia's voice carries throughout the book, melding with the tragic undercurrents. For me, the book reaffirms the importance of living WITH circumstance, rather than merely living through it. I love the book. My reading of "And Give You Peace" has been time well spent, and I am a better man for having read it. Be prepared for a wealth and range of emotion. Good stuff.

It will move you

Very rarely can a novel bring me to tears--this one did. Treadway's story of a family trying to piece together the clues of an unthinkable tragedy works like a mystery-in-reverse. Though we know the outcome at the start, rather than simply flashback to find the clues, the story instead moves forward, following the characters as they struggle to go on with their lives. This forward movement, in turn, provides the backdrop and the impetus for investigation of the past. In this forward-yet-backward movement, Treadway masterfully keeps us riveted in the what-will-happen, while at the same time engaging us in the mystery of the what-did-happen. It's a fresh and interesting way to build a narrative, and kept me rapt from the first page through the last.Not only is it artfully constructed, it also has amazing emotional depth--I cried not for the characters, but for myself, because I had BECOME the characters. Treadway has such a beat on the pulse of human nature that the reader slips effortlessly into the world of the novel, recognizing one's own thoughts, feelings, quirks and actions on every page. Though few people can say they have experienced the same tragedy as this family, the feelings and behaviors of the characters are so real, so everyday, that it's impossible not to experience the characters themselves.It's a wonderful novel and acheives the rare combination of literary mastery with page-turning pace. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys excellent fiction of any genre.

Approaching the impossible truth

There is a moment of intimate shock in Jessica Treadway's novel AND GIVE YOU PEACE where the narrator, eldest sister of three, breaks out of the third-person convention into direct address to her reader. "Do you know that hymn?" she asks, as with her mother and surviving sister she makes her way to the graves of her father and the little sister he has murdered at the start of this riveting, heartbreaking story of family love. "The words move across the music with a sharp, sweet pain, which, once you've felt it, stays as memory in your bones: The Lord bless you and keep you, / The Lord lift his countenance upon you, / . . . The Lord make his face to shine upon you, / And give you peace." In that brief and unrepeated narrative break Treadway holds her reader naked against this story's almost unbearable pulse, branding it into bone-memory too.AND GIVE YOU PEACE begins by relating the unspeakable and then unfolds like a long, confidential murmur to an intimate friend -- filled with bitchy asides, hilariously observed detail, and unreplicable sisterly lore -- which its listener never wants to stop. Anastasia Dolan needs us to know the whole story if we are to understand, finally, the worst of it; so she moves us matter-of-factly back from the day her father snapped, and into the sweet thicket of family connection that binds the Dolans close in its thorny embrace. ("We are the Dolans, mighty mighty Dolans," they sing on car trips, echoing the cheer.) And as we hear the details -- the father's compulsions about contagious disease, the girls' rivalries, the way the mother accommodates and compromises them all -- a picture of love emerges so truthful that even the most repugnant fact, in the end, can yield a kind of peace.Treadway's ability to pull this off -- to render joy through unimaginable pain -- starts with her masterful narrative choice to give us the bad news first. Going back from there, she unearths everything we'll need to go on. And so when the narrator turns her voice nakedly to us at the cemetery -- "Do you know that hymn?" -- we flinch in recognition, and then enter the grieving circle, willingly or not. We are the Dolans, too, approaching impossibility one step at a time, singing our sad triumphant song into the past and into the possible future.