Seven Loves

Valerie Trueblood
Little, Brown and Company (2006)
ISBN-10 0316058939
ISBN-13 9780316058933
Reviewed by Marcelline (Marcy) Burns for Reader Views (6/06)


A perfect book is the jewel that tantalizes committed readers as they turn first pages and settle in for long reading hours, hoping for pleasure. When a book is even close to perfection, we are rewarded. “Seven Loves” is such a book. May Nilsson, who speaks to us from its page, is vulnerable to love in its many wondrous and heartbreaking guises.  She makes us laugh and she makes us cry. We understand her, and that means she breaks our hearts. She loves her good husband and her absent daughters. She loves the son who was so lost he could not live, and she yearns passionately for the lover who leaves her. Ultimately, the great joys and pains of loving create her life and they end her life. 

“Seven Loves” is remarkable in many ways, not the least of which is its elegantly spare language. Valerie Trueblood gets it so exactly right!  She moves May forward in time and place without excess words. The reader is hardly aware of the “narrative” as such and can only marvel at how clear it all is, our understanding of what has happened and why it matters. This is a book that will be reread simply to experience it again.  Never will it be reread, because the words failed to tell the story.

A passage from almost any page would illustrate the truths told by Ms Trueblood.  Consider this one: “Of course you would not be able to pick the happiest day in a life …   There were too many different kinds of happiness, too many occasions for it. It sprang up in every soil. In no soil. Like ivy, it worked its way through brick, no matter that it might be a silly, upstart, last-minute thing.”

How profound it is, and how hopeful, that a simple life indeed can be lived large! With pain and sorry, yes, but also with joy and passion. Older women, who have lived long enough to understand, will marvel at the depth of this story. It is likely, too, that many will ponder how it is that a woman as young as Ms Trueblood knows these truths about life. Younger women, as they are able to carry May’s story with them during their own passages, will find in it both guidance and comfort.  A man who reads it surely will be wiser about the passions that steer women even in the ordinariness of their everyday lives. Without reservation, this is a book to be recommended to any adult reader.
Valerie Trueblood’s writing hand was steady and sure in “Seven Loves”.  We can hope that she will write again and again, and we will be watching for her name.

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