... what impresses most is the patient, unforced manner with which she delineates her story of tragedy and gradual renewal. Naturally and ineluctably, like a river finding its way to the sea, the characters drift into lives that are unrecognizable from what they intended for themselves ... the counterweight to the grief that besets Beneficence is the profound satisfaction the Senters take from their daily labor on their land. This is also a finely observed novel of chores and routines and seasons, and of the sense of agency that can be reclaimed through the 'covenant' of work. As organically as it traveled to heartbreak, Beneficence progresses to the place of wisdom that lies beyond it, where we learn that a home is part of the 'vast world of innocence and harm,' not an island beyond it.
[A] powerful story of love and loss and endurance ... Doris’s voice is almost silenced for many pages. When she does speak, the powerful, authentic rendering of depression is almost painful to read ... Hall’s simple, profound tale and clear prose is particularly reminiscent of the quietly rendered life cycles and enduring relationships (and the plain, beautiful writing) in another book, also set on a Maine farm: E. B. White’s children’s classic Charlotte’s Web ... transcendent.
The narrative resembles a meandering, obstacle-strewn river, flowing around outcroppings until those outcroppings become part of them ... Hall maintains a consistently elegiac tone, even as the perspective shifts from one family member to the next. This heightens the poignancy of the pain they’re all going through, and it reminds us that even when one person takes center stage, the others still exist ... These voices from the past speak so clearly to our time, at a moment when many of us wonder whether we’ll lose the things that we consider blessings, like civil rights ... a quiet but steady book, one that echoes ancient and important rhythms.
...the weight of ache and grace that anchors her writing is still firmly lodged, channeled through new characters and their stories ... These details, and others, are tucked deep in Beneficence’s heavy folds. It is a book that lingers and does not read in a single gulp ... Beneficence is cloaked as fiction, but underneath it is an iteration of real-life, unshakable feelings.
...delicate, poignant ... Spare but decked with moments of crystalline beauty, the book’s descriptions of farming the Maine countryside are authentic and enchanting. There are no ostentatious displays, and so the novel’s magnificence sneaks up ... gorgeous and moving.
Beneficence is one of the best novels I’ve read all year, the perfect antidote to troubled times, beautifully composed and lyrically told. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.
Meredith Hall, who splits her time between Maine and California, and whose memoir, Without A Map, was concerned with the tensions between good intentions, love and the capacity to cause harm, has now turned her quiet and stirring prose to fiction. Her debut novel, Beneficence, brings readers achingly close to these ultimately existential questions of goodness and love by focusing on a single family’s unspooling ... Beneficence is a glorious book, its joy as quietly beautiful as the tragedy at its center echoes loudly through the lives of its characters. Hall acknowledges that each life is very small, on its own, but that the love we each bear for one another is immense, our capacity for it endless.
...powerful if uneven ... her meticulous prose convincingly captures the daily realities—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel—of agricultural life, and offers insight into the ways calamity fractures family bonds. Patient readers will be rewarded.
