3.5 stars

79-year old Georgie is on her way to the airport as she has been invited by Queen Elizabeth to their shared 80th birthday celebration. Unfortunately, Georgie’s car goes off an embankment and lands in a ravine. Georgie is alive, but too hurt to move from where she landed and she and her car are not visible from the road. As she waits for rescue, she goes through memories of her family and her life.

This was good. The initial crash brought me in and although the memories initially weren’t as interesting, I found it picked up a bit when Georgie got married, so I liked the second half of the story better. I also liked the comparisons to “Lilibet’s” (Queen Elizabeth’s) life and the little royal tidbits brought in that way. I thought it was amusing that all the women in Georgie’s family had names that shortened into “male” names: Phil, Fred (she had an Aunt and Uncle Fred when her Aunt Fred married a Fred), Grand Dan… (ok, not quite all, but most). ( )

I loved this less as I kept reading. There are some coincidences that I couldn't quite get past. Still, parts of the novel are really breataking and reminiscent of a favorite book of mine Bonnie Burnard's the Good House. ( )

intéressant, donné

a quick and undemanding read but I wasn't grabbed by it, I didn't care if Georgie was found or not and I didn't find her life story to be particularly interesting. ( )

My husband can be very astute at times. Whilst reading Frances Itani's Remembering the Bones I was raving about the book and he said, "So you like it the same way you like obituaries then?" Exactly. Nothing to do with death at all, but rather for such a celebration of life. It's The Stone Diaries without the ghost, but also something original, beautiful, gentle and lovely in its own right.

The book begins with Georgina Danforth Witley, 80 years old and on her way to meet the Queen. She has been selected, along with ninety-nine other residents of the Commonwealth who share Queen Elizabeth's birthday, to attend a birthday luncheon at Buckingham Palace. This is an unlikely event in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman. Seemingly, of course; if we've learned anything from obituaries it's that nobody is ordinary. Georgie has a grown daughter, Case, her 103 year old mother still living, fond memories of her eccentric, salt-of-the-earth grandmother, Grand Dan, and the ability to name all of the bones in the human body. These she memorized from her late Grandfather's 1901 edition of Gray's Anatomy. She has talked to Queen Elizabeth, like a friend, for all her life. Georgie had a "polio honeymoon" and she understands why people laugh at funerals. Once she witnessed her husband in an act of love and fell in love with him for all time.

All this she remembers while she is supposed to be lunching with the Queen. On her way to the airport, not far from her own driveway, Georgie loses control of her car and careens between road barriers then crashes down through trees and into a ravine. Broken in the wreckage, unable to move or shout and with nobody aware she is in trouble, Georgie tells the story of her life, from childhood to widowhood, putting the pieces together and struggling to keep her brain active and her attitude positive. Her journey is a struggle to "remember the bones" she once knew so well, name them and thus reconstruct herself, and her life story. Georgie's story was of her most extraordinary ordinary life, and my heart was wrung by the joy and the sadness alike.

What happens to Georgie in the end, I think, is definitely a talking point, with some interesting ambiguity. I would argue, however, that the ending is the least important thing about all of this. Though I devoured this book rather greedily, it was for Georgie's voice and Itani's prose. This narrative is so beautifully constructed the pages fly by like those on a cinematic calendar, whizzing past faster than days go, until you're at the end and you're finished; but what you're left with is a life. ( )