Reviews of Above The Thunder by Renée Manfredi

Book Summary

The mesmerizing story of three generations of women confronting the emotional turmoil of abandonment, and the men with whom their lives converge.

Above the Thunder tells the mesmerizing story of three generations of women confronting the emotional turmoil of abandonment, and the men with whom their lives converge. Young and ambitious Anna puts her career on hold to support her husband through medical school, only to find out she's pregnant when it's her turn. Troubled and difficult from the start, Anna's daughter, Poppy, hasn't been home since she drove away with the man who came to buy the family's VW bus. After a twelve-year absence, Poppy begs to reunite with her now widowed mother, only to disappear again, leaving her mysterious and wildly imaginative young daughter, Flynn, in Anna's care.

This is also the story of Jack and Stuart, a couple struggling with commitment despite their love for one another. When Jack and Stuart meet Anna in a support group, they feel a connection that eventually leads them to form a loving, if unlikely, family. Gorgeously written and imbued with both wisdom and humor, Above the Thunder reminds us that created families can be every bit as vital as the families into which we are born.


From the Author 

The kernel of this novel began with an article I read over ten years ago in a Cincinnati newspaper. A ten-year-old girl committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train, in hopes of becoming an angel and joining her mother, who had just died of AIDS. It was a story that haunted me all these years, and became the spark that got the novel underway. The novel was well underway when Jack and Stuart walked in, but it was these characters I felt I knew best.

Mostly what I see now when I look back on writing this book, is myself working day after day, sometimes ten hours a day, often through tedium or exasperation or frustration. But there were also moments that I can only describe as magical, passages, especially in the sections with Flynn, in which the ordinary world became luminous and a little terrifying, whole sections of the book that I don't recollect writing. I don't put a whole lot of stock in mysticism, but the experience I had with this character made me rethink certain things about faith, about phenomena outside the mainstream. Odd things began to happen in my environment. The fuses in my house blew more times than I could count. The electronics went a little haywire ­ the television turning on by itself, lights flickering, clocks stopping at 3:33 a.m. ­ along with a spontaneous combustion of the heating system in my house that filled the entire house with ash and turned my white cat charcoal grey for months. Perhaps this is all coincidence, or my own inattention to things while in the white heat of writing.

What I do know for sure is this: that if I hadn't pushed past what I believed my limitations to be, I wouldn't have had those rare moments that have become the reason I write, those moments of feeling lifted up to a different level of awareness, moments of pure exhilaration that makes it all worth it.