From Publishers Weekly
The accidental death of her hockey star boyfriend forces a young woman to redefine her life and relationship with her parents in this lucid, crisply wrought novel set in Cambridge, Mass., in 1982. Twenty-two-year-old Leonarda "Leo" Baye--named by her eccentric parents after Leonardo da Vinci--is in the car with Danny McPhee after a party on the night his Harvard team wins a big game, when he loses control and crashes through a guard rail and into the river. But while Leo swims to safety, Danny, inexplicably, does not. Shattered by Danny's apparent suicide, scorned by his parents and conflicted about finishing her violin studies at the Boston Conservatory, Leo retreats to her musty childhood home on Cobb's Hill. Her mother, once a celebrated opera singer whose stage fright prematurely ended her career, rarely emerges from her room, while her father, a failed inventor, caters to his wife's every fragile whim. After Leo discovers that she is pregnant with Danny's baby, they all begin to have a salubrious effect on one another, bringing them "one foot over the rain line," into the "warm, sunlit place" that represents safety. This simple tale is redeemed from sentimentality by Pierce's sure, resonant prose. Leo is an appealing character and her parents, especially her mother, Lydia, who spouts statistics and non sequiturs, are affectionately and precisely delineated. In Pierce's patient hands (her Wonder Women won the 1994 Willa Cather Fiction Prize), this story of survival and healing achieves poetic immediacy.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Pierce's first novel is an outstanding work of domestic fiction in which the central action is made up of the flipped bookends of death and then birth. Main character Leonarda's daily life is a series of clich?s, surprising in light of her eccentric parents--her father is a self-styled inventor, her mother a post-breakdown prodigy. When boyfriend Danny is killed by a car crash into an icy river--a crash that Leonarda survives--the cold water wakes her from her slumber. She learns that she is pregnant with Danny's child, meets and falls for chess-whiz Kilroy, takes care of Danny's younger brother Po, passes a conservatory graduation audition, and watches as both her mother and father emerge from decades of somnolence. Advise readers to get past the purposely dull first 15 pages, and they won't regret it. Recommended for public libraries.
-Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
