Maeve is the heart of the Moone family, her husband Murtagh's queen, in their thatched stone cottage on Ireland's rocky island of Inis Óg. But in the first pages of The Dazzling Truth, Helen Cullen's moving second novel (after The Lost Letters of William Woolf), Maeve drowns in the frigid Atlantic, her pockets full of stones.
This tragedy happens on Christmas Eve, 2005. Then, Cullen backs up to 1978 to follow the Moone family through 2015. Knowing the sad ending doesn't spoil the delight of Maeve and Murtagh's courtship as students in Dublin, or their joy in their four children. Murtagh's pottery business thrives, and Maeve re-directs her acting talents. But recurrences of her lifelong burden are frequent, and "when the crow came to sit on her shoulder," she was "untethered"; when Murtagh proposes, she replies ominously, "Do you really think you can handle spending the rest of my life with me?"
After Maeve's suicide, Murtagh's "grief was louder in his ears than the waves," but Cullen's story then belongs to the children, and their distinctive paths create four new tales. As a family friend tells Murtagh's daughter Sive, pursuing a career as a glam-punk musician, "You are the best of her," an "impeccable cocktail" of her parents' genes. A decade of sorrow and angst divides the family, but a surprise plot twist leads to a joyous Christmas Eve 2015, and a memory of Maeve's motto, "You never have to lose anyone, or anything, if you just change the way you look at them." --Cheryl McKeon, bookseller, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.