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The Flicker of Old Dreams by Susan Henderson

"A truly memorable, poignant picture painted of how it feels to be the outsider in a small town and how scary and exhilarating it can be to simply let yourself live your life without knowing what will be around the next bend."
5 Stars
Pros: Mary, is someone we can all relate to and the feeling of being trapped in a small town is all too familiar
Cons: Near the end, it became just a "little" predictable but at the same time, it wasn't a bad thing. It left the ending open to so many possibilities that the touch of melodrama was necessary.

Full Review: 
Petroleum, Montana, is a dead town. It died the day, start Athlete, Edward Golden, was killed in an accident at the Grain elevator. The train that delivered the grain stopped coming and everything else eventually followed. Those who live in Petroleum are as ghostly and insubstantial as their once vibrant community. And one girl, Mary Crampton, feels just as insignificant and invisible as everyone else. The truth is though is that she's not. She may be the polar opposite. In a ghost town like Petroleum where the one absolute certainty in life is death, that is where Mary Shines.

Her father owns the only Funeral home in the entire area and Mary is the embalmer. She is quiet, reserved, and has taken to accepting the cruelty of the townsfolk jeers of "freak" with no scathing retort. She feels that she is a freak and that she's left behind everything she ever could have been when she decided to stay in Petroleum. She decided to work with her Father instead of pursuing her actual dream of attending art school and opening up a gallery.


She still paints, but her canvasses are now the corpses she receives. She is a compassionate and considerate artist. She does her best to revive them and make them look as hale and healthy as they were before they came to her. Mary has apparently accepted her fate, that she's not going anywhere and that she'll die in this town, the same as everyone else, until one day an unfamiliar truck pulls into her next door neighbors yard.

It is Robert Golden, the younger brother of Edward, who was there the day his brother died and may have been the accidental cause of it. His Mother is very ill and he's come to spend time with her in her last day. And though 20 years have passed since the terrible accident, the people of Petroleum do not forget and they do not forgive. Robert finds himself victim to cruelty and viciousness from a town of people who blame him for its death. But through his communications with Mary, who is helping arrange his Mother's funeral, a bond is formed.


They're both outsiders and Mary finds herself fascinated by Robert, wondering about the man who has come back after so much time away. And though he is a taboo subject in the town, she doesn't care. She is determined to get to know him, despite how her Father or the others in town may feel.


At its core, this novel is about self discovery; about finding out who you are on the inside and whether you have the courage to show that to the outside world. It is about being true to yourself, no matter what anyone thinks and it is about being brave enough to face the world, even when you don't know what will happen next.

It was an absorbing, poignant, out of the box read and it had an ending that left the reader satisfied and hopeful.

I would recommend this book to anyone really. It's been a long time since I've read something that I've enjoyed this much. And even though the subject matter is unsettling at first, there are no grisly details about the embalming process and Mary is seen as a character, not some leering mortician. Henderson does a wonderful job at making all her characters truly human, with good and bad traits and she manages to capture that small town isolation beautifully.  

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