When We Last Spoke

It’s never too late to appreciate the love of family in Marci Henna’s most recent novel. "When We Last Spoke" is an accomplished work of art characterized by retrospective narration that takes us back to a small 1960s Texas community. For narrator Juliet Cranbourne, recollection is vital to personal identity, for the life worth living is the life worth remembering—sometimes endearingly, sometimes critically. Juliet’s recollections are characterized by nostalgia, ruthless honesty, confessions of personal shortcoming, and ultimately by forgiveness, including self-forgiveness. Such memories are “still dancing in [Juliet’s] mind, untouched by the constraints of time.” I would characterize our narrator’s outlook as follows: “I remember; therefore I exist across time—and as a person whose experiences, recollected in tranquility, make me more empathetic and, with minor exception, more forgiving, and more of a human being.”

The novel offers us the portrait of an artist as a young girl--and as rendered by the older Juliet, who is pensive yet witty and wry. To read "When We Last Spoke" is to experience exquisite prose, accomplished character development, mature narrative artistry, and a post-doc in humane sentiment. Readers all the while luxuriate in the “amber glow” of an “antique lantern” rather than suffer the neon glare of modernity.