The Lavender Hour

Downsized from her teaching job, Jessie longs for a sense of renewal and decides to spend a year on Cape Cod, seeking to be cleansed by rushing ocean waters and comforted by the lavender hues of the setting sun. While there she volunteers with a local hospice program, where she meets Luke, a once proud fisherman whose life and body have been ravaged by cancer. Jessies presence is a great help to Lukes mother, who has moved in to take care of her son.

After initial misgivings Jessie and Luke forge a deep friendship, and the former teacher is surprised to find herself opening up about her life, the loss of her father when she was a girl, her often difficult relationship with her mother, and her own battle with illness. When Luke makes a critical request of his new friend, Jessie must look deep within herself for an answer, knowing that her actions will have far-reaching effects on Lukes family and forever change the bonds within her own.

"LeClaire's eighth novel (Entering Normal; Leaving Eden) centers on troubled Jessie Long, a cancer survivor who has passed the crucial five-year all-clear mark. Still unsettled and unattached at 32 with a self-proclaimed habit of looking for love in the wrong places, Jessie moves to her family's empty cottage on Cape Cod where she hopes to find some equilibrium while indulging in her side business — making jewelry. In the first of a series of increasingly destructive decisions, Jessie hides her medical history and volunteers to be a hospice worker. She is assigned to Luke Ryder, a 45-year-old commercial fisherman in the last stages of pancreatic cancer. Jessie falls in love before she ever meets with Luke, on the basis of a few candid photos, and as her need for love grows stronger and clouds her judgments, Luke inches ever closer to death. After Luke dies of a painkiller overdose, Jessie is hauled into court to face charges of assisting in his suicide. LeClaire might have brought some insight and complexity to her narrative during the trial, but instead it putters along. Jessie's epilogue epiphany, similarly, fails to convince." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)