I am so excited to share my review of Landscape of a Marriage by Gail Ward Olmsted. Thank you to The Coffee Pot Book Club for your invite to take part in the tour.
Landscape of a Marriage
By Gail Ward Olmsted
A marriage of convenience leads to a life of passion and purpose. A shared vision transforms the American landscape forever.
New York, 1858: Mary, a young widow with three children, agrees to marry her brother-in-law Frederick Law Olmsted, who is acting on his late brother’s deathbed plea to "not let Mary suffer”. But she craves more than a marriage of convenience and sets out to win her husband’s love. Beginning with Central Park in New York City, Mary joins Fred on his quest to create a 'beating green heart' in the center of every urban space.
Over the next 40 years, Fred is inspired to create dozens of city parks, private estates and public spaces with Mary at his side. Based upon real people and true events, this is the story of Mary’s journey and personal growth and the challenges inherent in loving a brilliant and ambitious man.
The wives of great artists are always under-appreciated. In this case, we honour Mary Olmsted, wife to Frederick Law Olmsted, the man responsible for designing many great parks, in particular, Central Park (I can’t say that without accidentally saying Central Perk… I was obsessed with Friends in my teens!) As can be imagined, with a husband who has a job such as Fred’s, Mary spends a lot of time apart from her husband while he is away on business trips. However, there are also some times that he could spend at home that he avoids doing so, for example, sometimes he sleeps in his office so he can get more work done. He is a complete workaholic, and it’s a surprise Mary puts up with it as well as she does. Fred puts her in difficult situations more than once, yet she is always ready to reassure him when he is concerned, or to provide him with the love and comfort he needs.
Mary came to Fred after the death of her husband, John. John was Fred’s brother, and with nowhere to go, Mary turns to Fred for help. Fred kindly set Mary up with a house for her and her three children to live in. After Fred joins their family, there are more children to come. There is some tragedy, which will break your heart and leave you reaching for the tissues, but there is also joy and happiness. The children are all written incredibly well, and they are all different from each other. I adored Owen and Marion in particular, for Owen was the troublesome kind of boy that you can’t help but love, and Marion was so incredibly loving, kind and willing to sacrifice anything for those she loved.
This book gives almost a journal type style to story-telling, as each chapter is a segment of Mary’s life, and it is written in the same way that I wrote in my journal before I gave up. I would only write if there was something interesting that had happened, or something important, something I didn’t want to forget. This book doesn’t pause on the days in Mary’s life when nothing happened, but focuses on the ones where something does. In a way, this is a fabulous way of moving the story along, but at times it made me feel a little disconnected from the characters. Something major would happen, and then we would move along a couple of months. We don’t see the small details, but with the whole purpose of the story to inform about the life of Mary, who is otherwise not very well known, this style of writing worked rather well.
Everyone likes a good book to sit down with, me more than most people. But there is usually a slight issue, in that I have children who needs constant supervision. This book is written in very short chapters, which are the perfect length for me to get through in between prising apart Lego blocks or saying no, you do not need another snack.
A lot happens in this novel, with Mary’s marriage to Fred being contained between the covers of a book, but it has been done so in a way that made me want to keep on reading, to keep on finding out about her life. I also learned about other things, for example, I had never heard of the Devil in the White City before, but looking the name up led me to finding a book of the same title that I now very much want to buy. Unfortunately, my book-buying budget has been used up for the next two years already, so I may have to hold off on getting my hands on it.
This book is everything the title says it is. It is a vast landscape that you are admiring, although instead of that landscape being one of Fred’s parks, it is Mary’s marriage, laid out to look at, and it is breathtaking, to say the least.
I received my copy from The Coffee Pot Book Club but you can grab your from Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon CA, Amazon AU and the Publisher.
Gail Ward Olmsted
Gail Ward Olmsted was a marketing executive and a college professor before she began writing fiction on a fulltime basis. A trip to Sedona, AZ inspired her first novel Jeep Tour. Three more novels followed before she began Landscape of a Marriage, a biographical work of fiction fea-turing landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, a distant cousin of her husband’s, and his wife Mary.
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Tour Schedule
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