Search - The World Below

Looking at old photographs of family, I have often wondered what their lives were like and what they were thinking when the photo was taken. Sue Miller explores that idea and the concept that below a surface of daily life our parents, grandparents, etc., had challenges, wants, needs, desires, secrets, conflicts that we never saw and never knew about. Sometimes because we don't see them as real people, with lives and pasts, we don't walk through the doors into their lives that they open. Sometimes we just have to reach a certain maturity before we are ready to accept that they may have wanted something else out of life than what they were given, or may have had a colorful, interesting or even sad past. Miller's book explores all of this and more as her main character tries to reconcile her past, present and fashion a future while learning more about a grandmother she deeply loved but never truly understood while the woman was alive. This is not a book of rapids and waterfalls, but a ride down the river of time, where we never quite know what will appear around the next bend, or what lies under the surface, in the world below.

Very beautiful story of generations of love. An elegant read. Starts in 1919 and goes to the present time of generations, and a home that was left to a grandaughter. She decides to visit and Catherine finds love still there that her family knew for years and she hadn't known until now. Lovely story-told ever so elegantely. Loved this book.

This is a compelling novel about a woman who returns to the home of her deceased grandparents following her divorce to recapture the peace and belonging that she once knew as a child. She remembers her grandmother through her diaries and her own memories. The grandmother's story of being hospitalized in a sanitorium for tb patients and her subsequent marriage to her doctor. The diaries reveal details of her grandmother's life previously unknown to the woman. It is a story within a story and told in Sue Miller's signature excellent style.

Miller probes marriage and family with characteristic insight and poignancy.

Another of Sue Miller,s studies of life and it,s meaning that sometimes is not obvious to those looking at family relationships. Fastinating.