"For twenty-two years, I existed as that murky shadow at the far edge of your peripheral vision, a faint reminder that there are those among the living who are exceptional at no level."

Matilda Fiona O'Rourke, or Mattie as she is known, is the sympathetic and wholly believable character at the heart of Remembering Blue. She is acutely perceptive and endowed with a good deal of self-knowledge. Despite this, Mattie is unaware that she is an intelligent, passionate, and resilient young woman. But not for long.

Enter Nick Blue, the man who becomes Mattie's husband and who meets his fateful death not long after that. But this is not a tragedy about how a man died and a woman's heart was broken. Instead, it is a story of how two people lived together fully. Remembering Blue is a love story, simple and true, that shows the heights to which even the "average" human spirit can soar.

Connie May Fowler's narrator, Mattie Blue, is special. Her reminiscences fix us to the page by showing the capabilities of the human spirit to overcome the vicissitudes of life and transform itself into something better, something stronger, and ironically, something it has been all along. The distant, inward-looking Mattie, whose solitary life seems to hold little hope for the future, is barely recognizable by the story's end. Mattie's slow emergence from the shadows of her past and into the light of new possibilities proves, finally, to be the best way of remembering Blue.

"Freedom through carpentry, that was my new motto."

Is her mother's death the catalyst? Because of it, Mattie packs up and moves. Or is the catalyst Nick Blue, love of her life? Or is it her developing interest in nature, family, carpentry, college, or gardening? The more complicated truth, and one that gives this novel welcome weight, is that it's all of these things. Mattie overcomes being abandoned by her father and mistreated by her mother, whose death leaves a legacy of mixed emotions, in a way that will have us nodding in recognition at the course of healing and life, and at the realization that there is no one way to transcend trouble.

Nick and Mattie move to his home on the island of Lethe, where she meets his large and loving family: his mother, Lillian, the matriarch of this Greek-American family of fishermen and women; his brother, Demetrius; his cousin, Beth; his nephew, Lucas; and his grandfather, Charon, who is connected at a primal level to the sea. Mattie's evolution in the embrace of a boisterous new family and awash in a hauntingly beautiful setting is glorious, though tinted with the tragedy that we know from page one is on the way. For Mattie tells her story as a recent widow, following the death of her vital, loving husband and best friend, Nick. To assuage her grief and understand it, Mattie describes how it all happened--not just the death, but the wealth of life surrounding the loss.

"A family member. That is what I had become, among other things."

Mattie not only becomes a member of the Blue clan, but also a storyteller, a memory keeper, a weaver of myth and legend, and a witness to family history and love. Fowler's ingenious use of the memoir form to tell the story of Mattie and Nick gives it the intimacy of a diary, one written with a keen sense for detail and drama, for truth and beauty.

For Mattie, the process of telling her story, of writing this memoir of love and marriage, becomes a way to use memory as a salve, as a balm, and as a tool to dig through her grief and get to a place where she'll live fully again. For those of us who read her story, it might just be instruction on how we can do the same.