Brenda Barrie
Novels of Contemporary Jewish LifeThe Rabbi’s Husband hits #1 on Canadian Best Seller List
Brenda Barrie’s new novel was unveiled in her hometown of Winnipeg, Canada, on Thursday, October 27 to great acclaim and high sales.
It was also posted the same week on Amazon.com, also generating substantial initial sales and great comments and reviews. The weekly Best Seller list, showing The Rabbi’s Husband in the top spot for paperback fiction in Winnipeg is on the site of The Winnipeg Free Press.
The Rabbi's Husband tells the story of Rabbi Tovah Feldner and her husband, Dan Goldin, who love each other. Even at the moment when Dan is planning to leave his wife and two children, their love is still evident.
But Dan has deep emotional hurts that he has never shared. Now he feels he must set out alone, searching to solve the physical problems of their three-year-old daughter Leah, who was born prematurely and is suffering from Cerebral Palsy.
Leah's birth had delayed the start of Tovah's first job after seminary, and Tovah – a perfectionist – has never been able to put her anxiety of the job behind her, even after working at Temple Isaiah for three years.
He job, considered the best regarded position offered to her graduating class, is also very wrong for her. Tovah has never admitted this to anyone, and her solution to being in the wrong job has been to work ceaselessly to make the job right.
After three years, her energy and ability to fool herself flagging, she wakes up one winter morning to find Dan is gone.
How does she discover what has really happened? And, once that is accomplished, can she forgive her husband and work with him to heal the wounds to their marriage by Dan's inability to articulate his concerns, and hers to communicate her true motivations and real spiritual needs?
Initial reviews have been extremely positive, including those from pre-publication readers:
Brenda Barrie does it again. Engagingly and with the deepest compassion, The Rabbi’s Husband explores the intricate connections that bind us together as families and communities. Barrie treats each of her characters with dignity and with such an open heart that I couldn’t help but be moved by every one of them. Their love is as palpable as is their pain, and I turned the pages eagerly, rooting for things to come out well for one and all. This is a truly fine novel.
– David Haynes, author of The Full Matilda, Somebody Else’s Mama, and others.
The prenuptial counseling offered by most rabbis includes plenty of advice on the importance of communication. How strange, then, that the lead characters in The Rabbi’s Husband – who clearly love each other very well - are such poor communicators! This very flaw is the catalyst for Brenda Barrie’s riveting, well-told and cautionary tale.
– Rabbi Cheryl Rosenstein, Temple Beth El, Bakersfield, CA
One extremely incisive comment came in a letter to the author:
I was so glad to read The Rabbi's Husband and enter again Dan and Tovah's world. There I am no longer a Scandinavian Unitarian. I am Jewish too. Their world, as Barrie writes it, is totally accessible to me and reminds me that it is only the interesting details of our individual social/spiritual worlds that separate us, and how these enrich our lives when we are open to them.
I love the world and the people Barrie created in The Binding and now in The Rabbi's Husband. I have long been impatient with the psycho/social pathology of so much of popular fiction. Tell me good stories of how intelligent, descent people cope with their mistakes and misunderstandings. Good stories of how they change and grow with these challenges, using their hopes and experiences to make their lives meaningful to themselves and their friends and families. Or as Plato put it so long ago: Art is to entertain and to teach.
– Virginia Sheff, Minneapolis, MN
A slide show of photos from the Winnipeg launch are posted separately on the Web.
Barrie’s prior novel is The Binding, published by RockWay Press in 2005. The Rabbi’s Husband is published by Gray Matter Imprints of Irvine, CA.
Amazon links
Brenda may be reached at brenda@brendabarrie.com