A Student of Weather [Paperback]

A stranger emerges from the snow-swept prairie, and the moment a young girl touches the "coin of frostbite" on his cheek, she sets off a rivalry that will span 30 years and follow her from the Saskatchewan dust bowl to apple-plenty Ottawa and the humid bustle of New York City. "A child falls in love with a man," the tale goes, "and the man is seduced by the intensity he has generated. Then his attention shifts to something else. End of story." But this is hardly the extent of Elizabeth Hay's Giller-nominated debut novel, A Student of Weather. For when easterner Maurice Dove arrives in parched Willow Bend to study the unusual phenomenon of the Hardy farm's being a veritable "magnet for moisture," he irrevocably disrupts the rhythm of the routine and the hearts of two Hardy sisters: golden Lucinda June and small, dark, unpredictable Norma Joyce.

A Student of Weather is a deftly textured novel about how accidents, in life and weather, impact destiny and how reticence can maim and claim lives. It is about arrivals and leave-takings, forgiveness bestowed then retracted, and the power of artwork to redeem and heal. Hay builds her characters and the world they inhabit from the small details: domestic, elemental, psychological, mythological. The novel's dark luminosity is perfectly embodied by the sisters, whose complex psyches lurk, subdermally, beneath every act, gesture, glance. The saga moves restlessly back and forth across the country, but its true beauty and strength lie in the Saskatchewan sections: the passages describing a seemingly barren grassland teeming with life are like "stepping outside into a burst of liquid birdsong." --Diana Kuprel

"Two sisters fell down the same well, and the well was Maurice Dove." Acclaimed Canadian short story writer Hay's first novel, recently shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize, is a compelling and highly original debut telling the story of two sisters and the jealousy that irrevocably changes their lives when a young student comes to stay on their father's Saskatchewan farm in the 1930s. Ernest Hardy is widowed, a single father raising two young girls on the rural prairies, when twenty-something Maurice Dove arrives from Ottawa to study the region's unusual weather patterns. Eight-year-old Norma Joyce, dark, fiercely intelligent, and inflicted with early puberty, claims Maurice from the first moment she sees him, albeit unrequitedly. Her sister, the "beautiful, saintly" Lucinda, 17, falls deeply in love. After Maurice leaves and his letters stop coming, Lucinda suffers a two-month-long deep depression. Seven years later, the sisters cannot forget Maurice. The Hardy family inherits a relative's house and moves to Ottawa, on the same block as the Dove family home. What occurs between then teenaged Norma Joyce (who will likely invite comparisons to Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed) and the war-damaged Maurice brings to light a childhood betrayal significant enough to devastate everyone involved. Moving seamlessly through 30 years in Saskatchewan, Ottawa and New York City, Hay's novel offers up just the right combination of melodrama and melancholy. Already a best seller in Canada, it should soar this side of the border, too.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Canadian author Hay's first novel begins on a Depression-era farm in Saskatchewan. The Hardy sisters, Norma Joyce and Lucinda, live with their widowed father. The sisters are opposites in appearance and in their approach to life. Norma Joyce, the dark, homely sister, is full of intellectual curiosity with artistic abilities, while Lucinda, older, blonde, and beautiful, is quiet and domestic. Thus, in some ways, they are natural rivals. When both fall in love with Maurice Dove, a student who stays with the family to study weather patterns, this unrecognized rivalry leads to mutual betrayals and a sad lack of family affection and understanding that affects the quality of their lives for nearly 30 years. As the story progresses, Hay's lyric descriptions of emotions, the prairie, the weather, and other natural conditions compel the reader's attention to the last page. Recommended for large public and academic libraries. Cheryl L. Conway, Univ. of Arkansas Lib., Fayetteville
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Canadian writer Hay brings her extraordinary attunement to the sensuousness of landscape to her mesmerizing first novel, which begins circa 1930 on the drought-ravished prairies of Saskatchewan, the home of two motherless sisters. The elder, Lucinda, is fair and diligent, Norma Joyce dark and willful, and both fall for a handsome, rambling botanist from fabled Ottawa, Maurice Dove. An aura of romance surrounds Lucinda and the charming stranger, but even though Norma Joyce is only eight, she is overtaken by a blazing love for Dove that turns her both monstrous in her scheming and nearly saintly in her devotion. As the sisters embark on a tragic rivalry that will determine the course of their lives, their story becomes a fairy tale in which solitude, work, art, and desire acquire mystical significance as Hay adroitly weaves their passions into luminous descriptions of extreme weather and the grand cycle of the seasons. Painterly in its lyricism, profoundly female in its voluptuousness, and acute in its psychology, Hay's contemplative yet dramatic ballad to beauty, autonomy, and creativity is akin to the work of Alice Hoffman and Isabel Allende and as enthralling as a sunset or a blizzard. --Donna SeamanSimply executed, the adult coming-of-age novel reflects life when we were young, but the more successful ones do more than summarize childhood in one epiphanous moment. Also, the protagonists are much more complex than those found in the typical YA novel, particularly the characters found in the classic coming-of-age work, including Twain's Huck Finn, Nelson Algren's Dove Linkhorn, and Toni Morrison's Claudia Macteer, narrator of Pecola Breedlove's tragedy in The Bluest Eye, which was Morrison's first novel. Listed below are some of the most successful coming-of-agers we reviewed over the last year. (Novels published after November 2000 were not considered.) Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

“There has never been a sister, lover, or daughter like Elizabeth Hay’s haunted Norma Joyce. A Student of Weather is as evocative as Jane Campion’s The Piano in its erotic obsessions and relentless quest for love and art. A sensual treasure.”
–Linda Svendsen

“Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx.…I was so moved by Norma Joyce’s painful, haunting journey to wisdom – and Elizabeth Hay’s telling of it – that I wanted to go back to the beginning and start again.”
–The Washington Post

“This is a book to break (and warm) your heart over and over.…Hay’s language is precise, economical and evocative. In A Student of Weather, every word counts.”
–Ottawa Citizen

“In stunningly precise and suggestive prose, Hay tells a story of obsession and rivalry.…Hay’s yearning, suffering women have the lit-from-within emotional intensity of D.H. Lawrence’s.…Brilliant.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A brilliant exploration of the universal themes of pain and betrayal and survival, rendered with such a sure, deft touch that Hay seems to be discovering new literary territory…”
–Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Be warned! You won’t be able to set this seductive book down until you’ve finished – sadder, wiser, and gladder to be alive.”
–Isabel Huggan

“In elegant and exacting prose, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the perilous power of love and all that we prefer to keep hidden about ourselves. Unsparing and unsettling, this exceptional first novel shines.”
–Diane Schoemperlen

“A Student of Weather is complicated, compelling, and beautifully told.”
–Maclean’s

“Hay’s contemplative yet dramatic ballad to beauty, autonomy, and creativity is akin to the work of Alice Hoffman and Isabel Allende…enthralling.…”
–Booklist (starred review)

“More than any other forecast, A Student of Weather reads the signs that mark the blessings and curses of persistence.…”
–Ottawa Citizen

“Hay’s book both captivates and astonishes. Read A Student of Weather and rejoice.”
–London Free Press

“Compelling and highly original.…”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Bad weather erupts and the result is the creation of an unforgettable fictional world.…This is a book to savour, to ponder and to read a second and third time.…A Student of Weather is first-class: heartfelt, with a sureness of touch and beauty of expression rare in fiction today.”
–Montreal Gazette

“This is a wise book, artful and impressively intelligent.…”
–Globe and Mail

“Hay has created a character who burrows into your mind and stays there. Norma Joyce is not larger than life, she is life, and she comes to us fully formed in this rich, compelling, satisfying novel.”
–National Post

“A work of rare beauty and integrity. Hay has created a heroine, Norma Joyce Hardy, who will linger in the mind long after the last chapter ends.”
–Ottawa X Press

“Elizabeth Hay has intelligence coming out of her fingertips – integrity, insight, and wonder in every paragraph of her writing.…She connects. She stirs and provokes.”
–Timothy Findley

From some accidents of love and weather we never quite recover. At the worst of the Prairie dust bowl of the 1930s, a young man appears out of a blizzard and forever alters the lives of two sisters. There is the beautiful, fastidious Lucinda, and the tricky and tenacious Norma Joyce, at first a strange, self-possessed child, later a woman who learns something of self-forgiveness and of the redemptive nature of art. Their rivalry sets the stage for all that follows in a narrative spanning over thirty years, beginning in Saskatchewan and moving, in the decades following the war, to Ottawa and New York City. Disarming, vividly told, unforgettable, this is a story about the mistakes we make that never go away, about how the things we want to keep vanish and the things we want to lose return to haunt us.

“There has never been a sister, lover, or daughter like Elizabeth Hay’s haunted Norma Joyce. A Student of Weather is as evocative as Jane Campion’s The Piano in its erotic obsessions and relentless quest for love and art. A sensual treasure.”
–Linda Svendsen

“Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx.…I was so moved by Norma Joyce’s painful, haunting journey to wisdom – and Elizabeth Hay’s telling of it – that I wanted to go back to the beginning and start again.”
–The Washington Post

“This is a book to break (and warm) your heart over and over.…Hay’s language is precise, economical and evocative. In A Student of Weather, every word counts.”
–Ottawa Citizen

“In stunningly precise and suggestive prose, Hay tells a story of obsession and rivalry.…Hay’s yearning, suffering women have the lit-from-within emotional intensity of D.H. Lawrence’s.…Brilliant.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A brilliant exploration of the universal themes of pain and betrayal and survival, rendered with such a sure, deft touch that Hay seems to be discovering new literary territory…”
–Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Be warned! You won’t be able to set this seductive book down until you’ve finished – sadder, wiser, and gladder to be alive.”
–Isabel Huggan

“In elegant and exacting prose, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the perilous power of love and all that we prefer to keep hidden about ourselves. Unsparing and unsettling, this exceptional first novel shines.”
–Diane Schoemperlen

“A Student of Weather is complicated, compelling, and beautifully told.”
–Maclean’s

“Hay’s contemplative yet dramatic ballad to beauty, autonomy, and creativity is akin to the work of Alice Hoffman and Isabel Allende…enthralling.…”
–Booklist (starred review)

“More than any other forecast, A Student of Weather reads the signs that mark the blessings and curses of persistence.…”
–Ottawa Citizen

“Hay’s book both captivates and astonishes. Read A Student of Weather and rejoice.”
–London Free Press

“Compelling and highly original.…”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Bad weather erupts and the result is the creation of an unforgettable fictional world.…This is a book to savour, to ponder and to read a second and third time.…A Student of Weather is first-class: heartfelt, with a sureness of touch and beauty of expression rare in fiction today.”
–Montreal Gazette

“This is a wise book, artful and impressively intelligent.…”
–Globe and Mail

“Hay has created a character who burrows into your mind and stays there. Norma Joyce is not larger than life, she is life, and she comes to us fully formed in this rich, compelling, satisfying novel.”
–National Post

“A work of rare beauty and integrity. Hay has created a heroine, Norma Joyce Hardy, who will linger in the mind long after the last chapter ends.”
–Ottawa X Press

“Elizabeth Hay has intelligence coming out of her fingertips – integrity, insight, and wonder in every paragraph of her writing.…She connects. She stirs and provokes.”
–Timothy Findley

Elizabeth Hay is the author of two highly acclaimed, bestselling novels. Her first novel, A Student of Weather (2000), won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award, and was a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Award at The Word on the Street. Her most recent novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. She is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992); Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her stories have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, and The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan. She has won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction and a Western Magazine Award for Fiction. In 2002, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Award.

Elizabeth Hay lives in Ottawa.

Two young Saskatchewan sisters, Lucinda and Norma Joyce Hardy, immediately fall in love with Maurice Dove, the charming weather observer sent from Ottawa who visits their family farm during a 1938 storm. That meeting changes the sisters' lives forever--introducing jealousy, romantic rivalry, and an unexpected pregnancy. Jennifer Overton brings a delicate touch to the portraits of the two sisters, making every thought and action into something essential to the story of their lives. This character study, built on broken dreams, loss, and sadness, captures the Hardy sisters and their elusive love in a well-crafted, often challenging drama. The novel was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and this audio production was broadcast on CBC Radio. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.