From Publishers Weekly
Four crucial years in a troubled teenager's life are the focus of this eloquently written, suspenseful second novel by the author of the praised Suspicious River. Having grown up in an extraordinarily suffocating atmosphere, 16-year-old Kat Connors greets her mother's disappearance one winter day with stoic calm. Kat is overweight, lives in a cookie-cutter suburb, feels her heavy figure makes her a social outcast?and yet has a pivotal adolescent sexual experience. Readers who find similarities between Kat and Delores Price, the heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, will also see eerie similarities in Kat's tense relationship with her mother (both mothers have birds as pets, in one case a parakeet, in the other a canary; the girls' fathers hate them; subsequently, both birds are found dead at the bottom of their cages). In both novels, mother and daughter end up sleeping with the same man without the daughter's knowledge. Like Delores, Kat sees a psychiatrist who becomes a father figure to her. Both heroines lose weight and triumph over their traumatic experiences, and each experiences the unexpected death of her mother. Despite these similarities, Kasischke's heroine is a fully rounded, distinctively portrayed character?a self-centered, typically hormone-crazed teenager who painstakingly develops into a self-aware young woman. Kasischke movingly charts her progress into a person, a young lady who learns to trust her instincts and her misgivings about the truth behind her mother's disappearance.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
At the start of Kasischke's second novel (after Suspicious River, Houghton, 1996), 16-year-old Katrina Connor is struggling to come of age in suburban Ohio. Preoccupied with sex and dating and eager to separate from parents she sees as terminally boring, she largely ignores her mother's efforts to lure her into closeness. Then, on a frigid January day, her mother vanishes. Sure, she had often complained about the dullness of marriage. But don't all full-time homemakers long for more, Katrina wonders? Why would she simply take off, without a trace? As the truth of Evie Connor's disappearance emerges, the reader is treated to a cacophony of raw teenage emotion. Shadowy dreams in which a beguiling Evie appears to Katrina enhance Kasischke's mysterious but always poetic prose. The soft, almost ethereal language makes the horrifying reality at the core of the book shockingly powerful, the hidden underside of a quintessentially normal domestic tableau. Highly recommended.?Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
