Western: The Undertaker's Wife
Listen to the perfect playlist while reading:
Genre: Western
Publication Date: 2005
Number of Pages: 284
Geographical Setting: Continental United States
Time Period: 19th century
Plot Summary: After a powerful New England businessman commits suicide, Richard Connable is called in by the businessman's ring of powerful associates to hide the cause of his death through his gifted art of undertaking. While he is away, his wife Lucy reflects on their decades of marriage as she makes arrangements for the arrival of her own death-- unbeknownst to her loving husband.
Subject Headings: Man-woman relationships -- Fiction.
Undertakers -- Fiction.
Historical -- Fiction.
Appeals
Characters: Flawed
While many of the main characters in the Western genre are stereotypical "champion[s] of justice" who spring into fights blazing their guns, Richard Connable is a quiet man whose fight for justice is won in the mortuary, where he gives grieving relatives the chance to see their loves ones as they once were-- a justice against Death. However, Connable has his fair share of demons, and his wife is the one who remembers it all.
Storyline: Character-Driven
Like many Westerns, Undertaker is an "interior struggle" through the eyes of our aging couple, especially Lucy, whose introspective journey through the memories of her life resembles a Western theme of "seeking escape, healing, or redemption". Lucy and Richard's tumultuous life together had its fair share of struggle and regret, and in the end, its those moments that made them who they are today.
Tone: Bittersweet
The Undertaker's Wife resembles classic Western tones in its "sense of longing for times past and an elegiac knowledge that these days will not come again", as well as "a nuanced treatment of serious issues". The nature of Richard's profession, and the experiences that the Connables have never forgotten, give the book its heartbreaking and bittersweet center.
3 terms that best describe this book: Romantic, atmospheric, richly-detailed
Read-Alikes:
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In the early 1900s, Ellen Webster arrives on the Wyoming Prairie to become a schoolteacher but finds love and life in becoming a rancher's wife. Soon, her world is filled with a kaleidoscope of women whose own struggles and stories help her through her own.
Similarities: Readers who fell into Lucy's story that Estleman painted so intricately will love the drama and richness of Dallas' novel. Like Undertaker, Coyotes relies on its characters to move you.
Oscar Stone, the most infamous and venerated hangman in the nation, reflects on the polarizing path of his life and the choices he could have made when a moment in time forces him to come to terms with who he has become.
Similarities: Published four years before The Undertaker's Wife, Executioner takes the reader on a similar journey of a flawed and heavy soul in the American West. Estleman's signature writing style draws the reader into the worlds he creates, dominated by the characters who inhabit it.
Based on real people and events, this tragic tale follows the fight between an expanding America in its youth and the native nations refusing to give up the land of their ancestors. Michael Punke deftly novelizes the 1866 Fetterman Fight, a moment in history few remember.
Similarities: Like Undertaker, Ridgeline features complex characters who bring the book to life, as well as a melancholy tone and rich prose that sinks the readers into the pages.
Learn about the history of death, medical examination, and undertaking...
In a look into the history of death rituals, Hayley Campbell gathers together the details of her personal expedition through the United States and the United Kingdom as she interviews all manner of professions involved in the death, preparation, and burial of our loved ones. In an attempt to gather as much insight as possible, she also investigates the preservation of bodies given to science, as well as those who are murdered.
Caitlin Doughty, a Los Angeles-based mortician, travels the world exploring all the different avenues of death rituals in various cultures and raises an argument for a change in American death practices.
Written by a New York City medical examiner who began her profession right before the devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Melinek takes us on a journey through her dramatic and heartbreaking career tending to the bodies of the city's loved and forgotten ones. This autobiography will prove to be a never-before-heard story for all readers.
Wyatt, N., & Saricks, J. G. (2018). The readers' advisory guide to genre fiction (3rd edition). American Library Association.
Oh my gosh, the Spotify playlist is amazing! Did you make it yourself? How were you able to add it to your blog post? All of this blogging stuff is so new and exciting to me I just want to learn all about it!
ReplyDeleteOnto the annotation, you made this book sound really interesting! did you enjoy reading it? It sounds like it was a good book, but I have never read a western so I wouldn't have the slightest idea what makes a good book in this genre.
Thank you for appreciating my playlist because trying to make a playlist for this book was HARD! I do make my annotation playlists myself by grabbing a bunch of songs to put in my queue, adding them to the playlist, and then doing a couple weedings of the playlist before I finish it up (my next annotation playlist is going through the weeding stage!). I try to pick songs that match the time period and/or tone of the book, then I name it after one of my favorite quotes, pick a picture, and then embed the playlist into the HTML code of the blog post!
DeleteWhen you are writing your blog post, there is a pencil button in the top left to switch from regular text to HTML. If you use Spotify on your computer, when you click share, you can choose to embed the playlist and click a box to show the HTML code. If you want to do it like me and embed the playlist after a short introductory sentence, you'll want to embed it after the closed paragraph code:
I don't know if there's a way to embed it without using HTML, but it gets easier once you do it a couple times!
For the book, I LOVE it. I'm not into westerns at all, so this was sort of my gateway into the genre. It doesn't follow the stereotypical genre themes, but instead is very romantic, introspective, and bittersweet. There was once scene where Lucy is remembering one of their earliest memories together and Richard says something so romantic my jaw physically dropped and my brain had to factory reset while eating my lunch at work. One of the things I love about it is that while it is romantic, it is also realistic and doesn't shy away from them going through very hard moments. Lucy and Richard are flawed people and that's what makes their story so enthralling.
Oh wow my comment took the closed paragraph code literally... Oops! If you aren't familiar with HTML there's instructions you can google!
DeleteI avoided the Western genre for annotations deliberately but your list of readalikes, nonfiction recs, and annotation itself really made this work sound interesting. As always, I love your playlists. What a great idea and a great soundtrack.
ReplyDeleteSide note - I've read All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell and was excited to see you recommend it here. I'm always fascinated by other folks' nonfiction picks.
As always love the spotify list! It's an extra "appeal" for your annotation! This book sounds so good and you did a wonderful job with the appeals. Great work!
ReplyDelete