GEMMA SOMMERSET
Jill McCroskey Coupe
Rootstock Publishing
334 pages
Gemma Sommerset, by Jill Coupe, introduces the title character at the time of her fourteenth birthday. She’s a good girl, a rule follower who makes good grades and belongs to a solid family—a husband, a veteran of WWII who teaches English, a wife who excels at the traditional role assigned to American wives in 1957 even though she completed graduate school with a degree in statistics, and the two children, Gemma and her younger brother Nat. In the opening scene, Gemma, along with a few other older girls at the summer camp she’s attending for a second year, leaves for an early morning ride on the trained jumping horses the camp owns. What could go wrong? In this case, a great deal. That experience opens her view of what’s possible beyond the tame life she’s accustomed to. The final sentences of Chapter One predict the course of the novel—“Earlier that morning, an unexceptional teenager had saddled a horse before dawn. A courageous, capable young woman trotted back to the stables.”
The novel’s five-part structure conveys the key eras in Gemma’s life. The first one, “Love and Marriage,” opens in 1957 at the camp, then backtracks to introduce key characters and eventually shows Gemma’s somewhat reluctant marriage in 1969 to Tim McKenna. She’s more concerned about her brother’s dilemma about the possibility of being drafted. The career Gemma had begun as a French teacher stops, and after two years, a daughter, Noreen arrives. The child is named for her mother-in-law. Trouble looms as Gemma has a fling with a man who’s building a deck she wants added to their house so she can watch the sunrise alone each day.
As Part Two, “Secrets and Surprises,” opens, the third-person narrator changes distance. Initially having employed a reportorial approach, the narrator now begins taking the reader deeper into Gemma’s inner life. It’s 1990 and Gemma has a budding career as a travel writer. Her husband continues his accounting practice. A research trip to Carmel, California, becomes something much more. As Gemma develops over the years, her awareness of her surroundings becomes increasingly acute, affecting her more. Author Coupe excels in bringing settings to life. The reader can sense the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Pacific shore enclave of Carmel, and throughout the rest of the novel other stops on Gemma’s journey are enlivened by the author’s deft descriptions of places and their effects on the character. Throughout the story, references by characters to musical pieces and to quotations from literature demonstrate Coupe’s skill at touching readers’ senses to deepen understanding of those characters.
Describing details of other plot elements in this review could spoil Gemma Sommerset for readers. Suffice it to say that Part III, “Death and Remembrance,” Part IV, “Truth and Consequences,” and Part V, “The Ceremony,” each are aptly named. Readers acquire a panoramic view of Gemma’s development as a human and as a woman at pivotal times in her world and her life. Surely, many readers will find much to reflect on in her life and to compare with critical points in their own lives.
The work moves seamlessly to an inevitable ending that left this reader reflecting on the whole of Gemma’s life as well as on the skill of the author. Plus, when I returned to the opening page, I understood how perfectly the epigraph chosen by author Jill Coupe encapsulated the story.
“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”
—Emily Dickinson,
letter to Elizabeth Holland, January 20, 1856
—Teddy Jones, author of The Jackson’s Pond, Texas series