Product Description

Opal is a single mother with a five-year-old son, Zack. Unhappy with her partner Billy, who takes no responsibility for Zack, and her parents, who side with Billy, she packs the car and, with Zack, throws a dice. Landing a three she vows to stop the car when three tanks of fuel are empty. And so she ends up in a small town in Massachusetts called Normal and rents a house next door to Rose. But Rose is still locked in grief for her son who was killed in a car accident five years ago. The two women couldn't be more different but, thrown together by circumstance, they become close when Opal is forced into a custody battle for Zack. Rose, who knows what it's like to lose the person you love most, becomes inextricably linked to Opal's struggle.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2736282 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review
In Anne D. LeClaire's Entering Normal, two women are bound by the shared trials of motherhood: birth, hope, separation, and grief. Though Rose Nelson is an older woman still mourning her son, who died five years ago, and Opal Gates is a young single mother scrabbling to raise her 5-year-old son, the two women begin to cleave together.

Both move through their worlds in a dreamlike trance, only surfacing above their own self-absorption when confronted by the violence of life: infidelity, passion, jealousy, and death. Though emotionally clueless men bumble around Rose and Opal, they are never able to pierce through these women's barriers. Rose and Opal are too convinced of their own needs--Opal believes she needs no one, while Rose focuses only on her dead son. As the two begin to find each other, the reader awaits the moments of growth that allow them to see beyond themselves. As Rose entertains hope, so does the reader, "In the morning light, for one brief moment, she ... can almost believe that she has already experienced her lifetime's allotment of pain and grief." LeClaire's skill for describing human action succeeds here as well, as her characters fail and triumph with realistic probability. Alternately melodious and emotionally torturous, Almost Normal is a moving debut. --Nancy R.E. O'Brien

From Publishers Weekly
An emotional wallop comparable to that produced by Sue Miller's The Good Mother or Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World awaits readers of LeClaire's latest (after Sideshow, etc.). In the small town of Normal, Mass., Rose Nelson has never ceased grieving over the accidental death of her teenage son, Todd. Years of unremitting grief and compulsive housecleaning have dismayed and frustrated her devoted husband, Ned, who tries to lose himself in work at the filling station he owns. Rose notices a peculiar itch around a mole that could indicate cancer, but tries to dismiss it because she doesn't trust drugs or doctors. At the same time, 20-year-old Opal Gates arrives in town with her young son, Zack, in tow. On the lam from her boyfriend, Billy, and her nagging mother in New Zion, N.C., stubborn, flighty Opal has landed in Normal because that's how far exactly three full tanks of gas have taken her chance and signs are central to her life. When she rents the house next door to the Nelsons, prudent Rose observes that "girls like Opal suck trouble to them" and resolves not to get involved. Though striving for independence and ambivalent about a new romance, Opal does seem fated to attract trouble. First, Zack breaks his arm when she sneaks out to the store while he's sleeping; then Billy, with Opal's parents' help, files a custody suit. The tentative friendship that slowly develops between Opal and Rose sustains both women as they face new obstacles and old demons, and the saga of these endearing (if at times frustrating) characters will hold readers' interest right up to the bittersweet ending. Agent, Deborah Schneider.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-LeClaire's first novel is a poignant mixture of love, loss, compassion, guilt, tolerance, and consequences. Opal, the 20-year-old unwed mother of 5-year-old Zack, has run away from home to escape her critical mother and Zack's father. Composed of equal parts na‹vet‚, sagacity, original thinking, and love for her son, the young woman feels that she has been given a sign to flee exactly as far as three tanks of gas will take her, which is to the town of Normal, MA. There she meets Rose, who is middle-aged and reserved-the opposite of Opal-and still in deep mourning for her teenaged son killed in a car accident five years earlier. While Opal could use a dash of Rose's restraint, Rose needs to stop blaming herself and resume living. Zack's father sues for custody of the boy, merely to show Opal who is boss. She fights it and Rose steps in to help after having seen how much Opal loves the child despite her shortage of parenting skills. Opal finds a new boyfriend, lower class with a heart of gold, and is unable to resist his charms, both in and out of bed, thus threatening her custody case. Rose's husband dies suddenly of a heart attack, and the two women end up helping one another through their respective ordeals. YAs will learn much here about human nature, the lessons leavened by Opal's offbeat thinking.

Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Breaking down the walls of the heart
I was a little disappointed to see so many people did not like this book. I for one found it to be one of the best I have ever read. Two mothers who have built emotional walls around their hearts concerning their children. Opal the young mother who may lose her son simply because she doesn't fit the mold of a perfect mother. Rose who lost her teenage son five years ago in an accident that she feels is her fault. These two have both built a wall around themselve that they find in the end has to be overcome. Rose is finally able to come to terms with how deep she has fallen into despair and that life does hold another chance for her. Opal learns that you can trust and I think that is all this book needed to say in the end. Entering Normal the perfect title for a great book.

Ultimately Disappointing
The reviews I read of this book made me very anxious to read it, as I too have lost a child and knew that I'd certainly be able to relate to the feelings of the grieving mother, Rose. Being drawn to this book because of Rose, I was intrigued about her life, the course of her grief over her son and the development of this unlikely friendship between her and Opal. Though the description of Rose's grief rang true to me, I felt that the book, as a whole, was full of holes, poorly developed characters and a faulty, contrived plot line. Though I finished it, I didn't really feel, by the end, that I knew Rose and Opal at all or that I understood who they were deep in their souls or why they would even be drawn to each other as friends, other than because of the surface circumstances of their lives. Opal was a truly botched character, and somehow she never came together for me as someone who was sympathetic in any way. She was angry and full of rage about her childhood, her family and Billy, she took lots of this rage out on Ty, I couldn't feel the development of anything true and real between them besides lust and sex...and she shared her rage with almost every character in the book with her charming (?) attitude. (All of her supposedly humorous self-talk about others in the book became really annoying to me after about the second time...and the book was loaded with these stupid, unfunny, private glimpses into Opal's feelings about people!) Also, though I am a really good cusser who is not offended by much, I felt that her sailor's mouth was way overdone. Rose also suffered from the same lack of character development, I thought, and was a shadowy and foggy figure throughout whom we didn't get to know in any substantive way, either. And the ending was almost unbearable to me. It was so contrived, tucking in all the loose ends and coming up with a neatly wrapped package of unreality and illusion that left me with feelings of "Oh, right!" and "Come on, Anne Leclaire, do you really expect us to believe this?" This book was, ultimately, a major disappointment for me and a major waste of my cherished reading time. I do see lots of 5 star ratings for this book, though, and I am very puzzled and wondering: Did we all read the same book? If so, I must certainly have missed something!

Thought provoking
This book managed to keep me occupied for hours on a plane, always the mark of an engaging story to me!

"Entering Normal" is the story of emotional and painful times in the lives of two very different women, but it never descends into angst, nor do the main characters ask for pity.

Rose is 50 and lost a son, her only child, in a car accident five years ago. Opal is 20 and is running away from her controlling family and the father of her five-year old son when she rents a house next door to Rose's. How these two women *rescue* each other, emotionally and otherwise, is the topic of this novel.

Rose has been consumed by grief for five years because of her imagined guilt. Opal is trying to keep custody of her child. The bond of motherhood brings these women together and allows them to help each other in ways that neither would have imagined.

Anyone who has experienced the joys and sorrows of parenthood will be able to relate to these sentences :"Watching him, she feels a familiar jolt in her stomach, the sharp, sweet terror of motherhood." "Having a child is like having your heart walk around outside of your body, bumping into things."

Rose tries to write what she feels, keeping this a secret from her husband, Ned, who cannot manage, despite his best efforts, to penetrate her grief. Le Claire writes: "She wrote all about Todd and how she missed him and how one minute a person could be in your life, laughing and smiling and driving you crazy with their foolishness, and then the next, with no warning, they were gone and all the words you never got a chance to say would be locked up inside you, and what ever happened to words locked inside, where did they go?" Food for thought.