MEET ME AT THE MUSEUM by debut
author Anne Youngson is one of my favorite books of the year so far. That is mostly
because of how beautifully written it is and how it surprised me that readers
would be able to envision so much through the correspondence that is the heart
of this novel. The first letter is from Tina Hopgood, now a farmer’s wife and grandmother in East
Anglia, who refers to an archeological finding (the Tollund Man) which was an
avid interest of her younger self. She
writes to Professor Glob, a scholar involved with the find. He, however, is no longer alive and Anders Larsen, a widowed curator at the Silkeborg Museum in
Denmark, responds to her.
From there, the letters gradually become less formal, more self-reflective
and increasingly personal as each shares life events and musings. One of my most
favorite passages is “Whenever I pick raspberries, I go as carefully as
possible down the row, looking for every ripe fruit. But however careful I am,
when I turn round to go back the other way, I find fruit I had not seen
approaching the plants from the opposite direction. Another life, I thought,
might be like a second pass down the row of raspberry canes; there would be
good things I had not come across in my first life, but I suspect I would find
much of the fruit was already in my basket.”
There is an online reading group guide, but MEET ME AT THE MUSEUM is so unique
you may want to savor it with just a few special friends. This title is an Amazon
Best Book for August 2018, as well as being both a LibraryReads and Indie Next selection.
