A Shower of Roses
Tom Milton, 2010
Nepperhan Press
177 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780982990414
Summary
Eva’s mission in life is to help people by doing little things for them, instead of performing great heroic acts. She is a pediatric nurse at a hospital in New York, and things are going well for her when she meets Marek, a Polish exile, and falls in love with him.
Marek ostensibly works for a large international bank, but that is a cover for his role as a CIA agent with the mission of fomenting a popular uprising against the communist government of Poland. At the request of the CIA the bank transfers him to London, where the story opens in April 1981, shortly after Poland announced that it would be unable to repay its foreign debt and the Solidarity movement emerged in the port of Gdańsk.
Eva had never dreamed of marrying a man like Marek, but she responds to his need for love, and she devotes her life to him. She is fully aware that his work is dangerous, and every time he goes to Poland she worries that he will be arrested by the secret police. Though he drags her into a world of political intrigue and tests her love by subjecting her to increasingly painful experiences, she keeps her promise to love him no matter what he does, until she confronts the truth about him—and about herself. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 3, 1949
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Education—Ph.D., Walden University, M.A. University
of Iowa (Writers Workshop), B.A. Princeton University
• Currently—lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
Tom Milton was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. After completing his undergraduate degree at Princeton he worked for the Wall Street Journal, and then he was invited to the Writers Workshop in Iowa City, where he completed a novel and a master’s degree. He then served in the U.S. Army, and upon his discharge he joined a major international bank in New York. For the next twenty years he worked overseas, initially as an economic/political analyst and finally as a senior executive. He later became involved in economic development projects. After retiring from his business career he joined the faculty of Mercy College, where he is a professor of international business. Five years ago he found a publisher for his novels, some of which are set in foreign cities where he lived (Buenos Aires, London, Madrid, and Santo Domingo). His novels are popular with reading groups because they deal with major issues, they have engaging characters, and they are good stories.
His first published novel, No Way to Peace, set in Argentina in the mid-1970s, is about the courage of five women during that country’s war of terror. His second novel, The Admiral’s Daughter, is about the conflict between a young woman and her father during the civil rights war in Mississippi in the early 1960s. His third novel, All the Flowers, set in New York in the late 1960s, is about a gifted young singer who gets involved in the antiwar movement because her twin brother joins the army to prove his manhood to his father. His fourth novel, Infamy, set in Madrid in 2007, is about the attempt of security agents to stop a terrorist attack on New York City that would use weapons of mass destruction. His next novel, A Shower of Roses, set in London in the early 1980s, is about a young nurse who is drawn by love into an intrigue of the Cold War. His next novel, Sara’s Laughter, set in Yonkers, NY in 1993, is about a woman in her mid-thirties who wants a child but is unable to get pregnant. And his latest novel, The Golden Door, is about a young Latina woman in Alabama whose future is threatened by a harsh anti-immigrant law that the state passed in 2011. (From the author.)
Book Reviews
“Do we have a purpose?” “Are we capable of unconditional love?” “What is God’s role in our lives?” These are the types of questions Tom Milton explores in his fifth novel A Shower of Roses. But perhaps Milton’s most pressing question is, “Can womankind save mankind (because he’s surely not going to save himself)?”
Set primarily in London in 1981, the story follows the life of Eva Ostrowski. Eva is the daughter of Polish parents who escaped the onslaught of the Germans and the Russians during World War II. She is married to a man named Marek whose name can be loosely translated as “a severe brand of Pole.” Marek, like Eva’s parents, is also a transplanted Pole who now works for the CIA. He often travels back and forth to Poland (disguised as a banker) in an effort to aid the Solidarity movement’s attempt to overthrow Poland’s communist government.
To fully develop Eva’s character, Milton intersperses the storyline with insightful passages about Eva’s past. Eva was raised in a tightly-knit Polish community in St. Paul, Minnesota. Catholicism and polka music were the two most important ingredients in the glue that held this community together. During her fifth-grade year, Eva’s favorite nun gave her a book called The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux. Through this book, Eva came to understand that in a world dominated and controlled by men, her greatest contribution would be myriad small acts of kindness and the spreading of happiness through unconditional love for others.
Eva’s marriage to Marek is the embodiment of the theory that opposites attract. He is an atheist. His sole mission in life is to effect the political balance of power on the world stage, and he is unconvinced anyone is capable of unreserved love. Eva is everything he is not, and it is through this relationship that Milton presents the reader with his theories regarding some of life’s most profound issues.
A Shower of Roses is provoking and engaging. The story takes its time developing the central theme of finding and defining one’s place in the grand scheme of things, but once it hits its stride, Roses is hard to put down. Eva’s struggles and insights take place in a world seemingly designed by Emmanuel Kant and Virginia Woolf, a world in which the desire for power and control at all costs meets the belief that unconditional love can save a soul from the “darkness of unending night.”
Can a price be placed on a human life? Is there a limit to the amount of love one can give? A Shower of Roses takes its audience to dark places in its search for answers to these questions, but by the end of the story, after encountering these issues for herself, Eva “knelt down and thanked God for revealing the truth to her.”
Chris Fisher - Foreword Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why was Eva attracted to the mission of helping people by doing little things for them?
2. Why did Eva respond to the discovery of her father’s infidelity the way she did?
3. What do Eva and Ramona have in common other than the fact that they are pediatric nurses at the same hospital?
4. What does Eva learn by sharing with Ramona her discovery about her father?
5. How does Eva’s experience with her father make her susceptible to Marek’s appeal in the Recovery Room?
6. What makes Eva believe that she can love Marek no matter what he does?
7. What do Eva and Juliana have in common other than the fact that their husbands are involved in international banking?
8. What important insights about herself does Eva gain from her conversations with Juliana?
9. In one conversation with Juliana, Eva talks about the Jungian concept of reconciling the past and the future. Why is Eva unable to do this?
10. What do Eva and Francis have in common other than the fact that they are both taking the same course at the University of London?
11. What important insights about her husband does Eva gain from her conversations with Francis?
12. Did Marek’s personal needs jeopardize his political mission?
13. Why does Eva trust Marek and believe everything he says?
14. Is Eva’s commitment to her mission compromised by her devotion to her husband?
15. While Marek is testing Eva’s love for him, is he also testing her faith in God?
16. Who do you think betrayed Marek?
17. Do you think what happens to Eva supports the notion that in spite of all the advice we get from other people, we can learn only from our own experience?
(Questions courtesy of author.)