Book Review: This Place of Wonder

Synopsis:

Famed chef Augustus Beauvais dies, leaving behind a celebrated reputation and his world-renowned restaurant in beautiful Santa Barbara, California.

He also leaves the four women in his life grappling with loss, anger, pain, and the question of how the world will go on without him in it.

Meadow Truelove, his ex-wife with whom Augustus built an empire and created a family, still holds him in her heart, even as she continues to struggle emotionally with his infidelities and the end of their twenty-year marriage.

Maya, his biological daughter, was estranged from him for the last eight years following the divorce. She has just completed rehab and is ready to relaunch her life.

Norah, his last girlfriend, sidelined her own career for unexpected love and a life of luxury, both of which are now gone.

And Rory, Meadow’s daughter, is the voice of calm and reason amid the others’ chorus of discontent.

Meadow, Maya, Norah, and Rory are flung together by tragedy, grief, and secrets. Each must accept or turn away from the legacy of great intentions and bad decisions Augustus left to them. And when the circumstances surrounding his death are called into question, their conflicted feelings grow even more complicated.

But moving forward is the only choice available to them. So in order to do so, they’ll need to learn to rely on family, friendship, and inner strength. The four women’s journeys prove to be empowering and wondrous.

Review:

Bestselling author Barbara O’Neal says that she decided to be a writer when she was just eleven years old. That was the point at which she understood that the books she so enjoyed had actually been written by an author and that was a job that sounded ideal. The earliest book she recalls reading was A Big Book of Fairy Tales, but it was Green Darkness by Anya Seton that inspired her to write. She is also an avid reader and enjoys hiking, gardening, and traveling. Recently wed, she lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. O’Neal also learned to love restaurants as a teenager and spent more than ten years working in vastly different establishments serving a wide variety of cuisines before publishing her first novel. Restaurants, gardens, and food figure prominently in her latest book, A Place of Wonder.

The story opens with the death of Augustus Beauvais. At sixty-seven years of age, Augustus was still the handsome, charming, sensual, and charismatic celebrity chef with a vaguely French accent and “an aura the size of a live oak.” Meadow, his ex-wife, fell in love with him when she was still a teenager. Divorced eight years ago after twenty years of marriage, she is informed of his passing by Norah, the young woman with whom he was living for the past nine months in the stately home, Belle L’été (Beautiful Summer), he previously shared with Meadow. Augustus is initially believed to have succumbed to a widow-maker type of heart attack in the kitchen of his Santa Barbara restaurant, Peaches and Pork. Maya, his thirty-one-year-old daughter, a sommelier and wine maker, is released from rehab two weeks early in order to be with Meadow, her stepmother, and her stepsister, Rory, so long as she agrees to attend ninety Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the coming ninety days. Hearing the news of her father’s death, Maya is only able to feel numb because the two of them have not had a relationship since Augustus left Meadow, even though Augustus covered the costs of rehab. Two days after she rushed to Norah’s side to comfort her, Meadow returns to Belle L’été and callously informs Norah she must leave immediately because Maya has inherited both the home and the restaurant, and will be arriving the next day. But Norah has only about two hundred dollars in her bank account and nowhere to go, so she must fall back on survival skills she learned as a child being shuffled around the foster-care system. Like Norah, Meadow only learned to appreciate “extravagant luxury — the kitchen, the house, the man himself” after getting involved with Augustus.

O’Neal employs three alternating first-person narratives from Meadow, Maya, and Norah to tell the story of how they, along with Rory, come to terms with Augustus’ unexpected death, as well as their relationships with him and each other. As they navigate their complicated feelings of grief, loss, anger, regret, and deep love and longing for the man who meant so much to them, they each relate their history with him.

Norah never meant to get involved with Augustus. She came to California looking for Meadow after Meadow’s book, Between Peaches and Pork: A Celebration of Sustainable and Festive Food, “changed the trajectory” of Norah’s life. She majored in gender and women’s studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and the book inspired her to pursue her graduate degree at Harvard and fashion a career writing about women and food. She became slightly obsessed and bit smitten with Meadow, and wanted to interview her, along with other female chefs, about how they “influenced the male-dominated world of food.” Meadow was an enigma. Norah’s extensive research failed to reveal any information about Meadow’s early years, before she met Augustus. The email Norah sent to Meadow was read by Augustus, who invited her to Peaches and Pork. When Norah arrived and was greeted by Augustus, their chemistry was instantaneous. “I forgot all about Meadow. That, as it turned out, was a mistake.” With Augustus gone, Norah must quickly find a job and a place to live, and resumes her research into Meadow’s past in earnest, determined to uncover Meadow’s secrets and complete her dissertation.

When Rory arrives at the rehab facility to drive Maya home, it is immediately evident that she is overcome with grief over her adopted father’s death. Rory is happily married to a cabinet maker and they have two young daughters. She is only eight months younger than Maya, who was adopted by Meadow after her mother’s death. The two girls have always been close, providing each other companionship, as well as unconditional support. Now Maya will need Rory’s support as she embarks on maintaining her sobriety outside the sheltering confines of the rehab setting. In addition to inheriting Belle L’été, Maya is also the new owner of Peaches and Pork, but she does not want either property. The house is imposing, situated on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and costly to maintain. Running the restaurant is out of the question because Maya recognizes that she cannot be around alcohol. That means that not only does she have to start her post-rehab life without her longtime boyfriend, whose betrayal launched her alcohol-fueled revenge, but must also find a new career, putting her days as a gifted winemaker behind her. For the time being, however, she will stay at Belle L’été and begin work at the coffee shop where Rory’s husband has gotten her a job.

Meadow adores both of her daughters and is understandably worried about them. She fears for Maya’s fragile sobriety, as did Augustus, and is concerned about how deeply his death is impacting Rory, who cannot bring herself to inform her daughters, aged five and three, that their grandfather is dead. But Meadow has a tendency to hover which creates friction between her and her daughters. Their conversations, particularly when the two sisters stand up for each other, as well as to Meadow individually, ring true. Meadow is also grieving Augustus, the only man she ever loved and with whom she believed she would spend the rest of her life, willingly overlooking his dalliances with other women. “Wounded women were catnip to Augustus.’ One such affair lasted for six months before Augustus left Norah and married the much younger woman. She has never gotten over the end of their marriage.

Norah has always kept secret the details of her “brutal” childhood from which she ran away. Only Augustus knew her history, and she knew his, but she “chose what to tell the world. It’s my story. I’m allowed to leave out what I don’t want the world to know.” Thus, she designed her public image and biography. “Who I am was born when I was sixteen and found work as a prep cook at a restaurant on the coast.” Three years later, she made her way to an organic farm in Ojai, working as a liaison between the farm and restaurants. There, she found childcare for Rory . . . and also found Augustus, who was then still married to Maya’s mother. Together they built an empire consisting of the restaurant and Meadow Sweet Organic Farms, were trailblazers in the California farm-to-table movement, and became celebrities in the food world.

O’Neal infuses the story with two mysteries. One involves Augustus’s death, which is deemed suspicious by the local police who question the women, as well as Kara, Augustus’s loyal restaurant manager, and delay releasing his body until the cause of death can be confirmed. The other centers around Norah’s investigation into Meadow’s true identity and background. She is determined to learn where Meadow grew up, what her family life was like, the identity of Rory’s biological father, and why Meadow has worked so judiciously to conceal those aspects of her life. She wants to write about the ways in which Meadow’s early years molded her into the indomitable powerhouse she became. But Meadow is infuriated by Norah’s snooping into her past.

Each of O’Neal’s characters is fully developed, fascinating, and empathetic, if not always likable. Maya is particularly sympathetic because she inherited her addictive personality from her mother and used alcohol for years in order to avoid confronting her complicated feelings about both of her parents, as well as the circumstances surrounding the creation of her father’s new family with Meadow and Rory, and her place within it. She resented her father because she felt he abandoned her — more than once — and now has to work through her anger and regret about not being able to resolve their relationship before he died. She is left to reconcile her feelings without his input and participation in that process. Being back at Belle L’été, she remembers her father’s big laugh, the nicknames he bestowed on everyone, the perfect gifts he picked out, and how loyal he was to his staff. “Seeing me. That was his gift, after all: seeing people.” And sans the alcoholic haze within which she has existed for years, she at last recognizes the destructive behavioral and relationship patterns in her life up to this point, and vows to disrupt them. O’Neal notes that she wanted to explore Maya’s recovery without that aspect of the tale dominating it, and she succeeds, depicting Maya’s struggles compassionately. O’Neal also credibly examines the ways in which Maya’s alcoholism has dictated outcomes in her life and relationships. But now life has many surprises in store for Maya, and she has the opportunity to make clear-headed choices that are right for her, despite what anyone else believes is in her best interest. Can she bravely deal with her emotions without masking them with alcohol, and create a healthy and rewarding life for herself in which there is room and grace for those she loves?

Norah had a difficult childhood, but managed to secure a scholarship that enabled her to earn her undergraduate degree before pursuing graduate work while working. She got sidetracked when she became involved with Augustus, but her feelings for him were genuine. She misses him, as well as the privileged lifestyle they briefly shared, although she confides to Norah that he had not been himself during the last couple of months preceding his death. Now she has no reason to curtail her research and knows that she does not need Meadow’s approval or consent to write about what she discovers. Rather, she is free to work to achieve her dream of being a published author. She is aware that Meadow resented her, and intuited that Meadow and Augustus’s relationship never really ended when she observed their interactions. Somewhat surprisingly, she finds herself drawn to Maya, who is generous and gracious to her, and the two young women form an alliance.

Meadow’s story is the most intriguing. Through her engrossing narrative, O’Neal offers insight into her long history with Augustus, providing the context requisite to understanding their unbreakable bond, and deep understanding of and immense respect for each other. Meadow believed she and Augustus would have time to “finally heal the rift between us.” With him gone, she wants Maya to keep the restaurant open, so that his legacy can live on, but it has aged, needs costly renovations, and is financially troubled. She loved Belle L’été, having lovingly decorated it and raised her daughters there. Initially, she sees Norah as just an interloper, another woman Augustus thought he needed to rescue. But as the women await the outcome of the police inquiry and Meadow comes to terms with what the future holds, O’Neal convincingly illustrates how much alike Meadow, Norah, and Maya really are.

O’Neal says that she is always interested in exploring relationships between women and in This Place of Wonder she has included “a great mix of relationships — mothers and daughters, sisters, friends, and the wild card of a much younger girlfriend of the now-dead Augustus, who might have been a figure of disdain elsewhere but walked in vulnerable and a bit lost.” Indeed, This Place of Wonder is an absorbing and touching tale about how several catastrophic events, including Maya’s meltdown that results in her entering a rehabilitation program and Augustus’s untimely death, challenge the women who loved Augustus to evaluate their pasts in order to move forward. Long-held resentments and old wounds, coupled with grief, force the women to confront and resolve their feelings about Augustus, losing him, and their own lives. Secrets discovered must be assessed, taking into account the potential havoc they might wreak and the hurt they have the power to inflict if revealed. Augustus was a man with a driving need to save the people in his life, yet he failed to save the one woman who mattered most to him and that was one of the two things he regretted most. But she is an adult now and it falls to her to save herself. Can she and the other women who mattered most to Augustus forgive him for his shortcomings and flaws, choosing to remember and cherish the significant and consequential moments of joy and love he brought to their lives? Can they forgive and appreciate each other? Most importantly, can they forgive and respect themselves, accepting that their futures no longer include Augustus? O’Neal provides a satisfying conclusion to an entertaining and thought-provoking story about the profound and lasting impact loved ones have on each other’s lives. She also demonstrates what an important role family plays in our lives, no matter its configuration or origin.