The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay

May 3, 2010
The title of Jensen’s posthumous debut adequately sums up its tone and economic milieu. Spanning the years 1916 to 1987, the novel offers vignettes from the lives of sisters Idella and Avis Hillock, opening with an account of their mother’s death in childbirth and closing with Idella’s husband, Eddie, now an old man, reminiscing about his life with Idella. The Hillock girls spent their early years in the rough landscape of New Brunswick, Canada, where grief and hard living have damaged their widowed father. Eventually, Idella escapes to New England, where she finds a husband and her own domestic troubles. Younger, more attractive sister Avis has an even harder path ahead; after attracting the ardor of her father’s friends as a teen, she embarks on a series of damaging romantic entanglements. This has an unfinished feel to it (Jensen died unpublished in 2003), and while the sisters’ troubled relationship rings true, the story-like chapters feel quite independent of one another, and the dialogue has a tendency to veer into forced colloquialisms and melodrama. Readers will be left wondering what else Jensen might have written had her career not been cut short.

October 25, 2010
Bernadette Dunne has a pleasantly hoarse, easygoing voice that seems to grows increasingly textured and wiser as the novel progresses and the sisters age. Her clear emotional tones amplify the scenes as she travels with Idella and Avis from tragic childhoods through humdrum adulthoods to comic endings. Without awkward exaggeration, she creates a unique personality for each character, male and female. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, May 3).