From Publishers Weekly
The aftermath of the World Trade Center attack provides a traumatic backdrop to Schwartz's latest novel (after
In the Family Way), an intellectually evocative and emotionally trenchant exploration of troubled intimacy and the constitutive effects of language. Renata, a Brooklyn-based 30-something librarian with a gift for recondite tongues, is stymied in her promising affair with fellow Brooklynite Jack by her vows of "emotional celibacy," the result of a long history of family trauma, including the tragic death of her twin sister, Claudia, at age 16. When the Twin Towers are struck, Jack's assistant at his downtown social services agency perishes in the collapse, and he and Renata become the caretakers of her baby, Julio. As Renata develops an obsessive attachment to the baby as well to a mute stray teenager she names after her dead niece, Gianna (born just before Claudia's death), Schwartz artfully reveals the origins of Renata's psychic scars: the twins' overenmeshed relationship, the death of their father and institutionalization of their mother, plus Gianna's mysterious drowning. Renata's emotional wariness links to her suspicions of language in general, which are exacerbated by the president's verbal response to the terrorist attack. With Renata's complex balance of intellectual skepticism, emotional fragility and street smarts, Schwartz continues to show herself a rigorous novelist.
(June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Schwartz is a connoisseur of anguish, especially survivor's guilt, yet she is also an adept choreographer of romance. Incisive, unafraid to flirt with melodrama in pursuit of a compelling story, acutely descriptive yet to the point, she now brings to fiction the era-defining tragedy of September 11, 2001. New Yorker Renata, a librarian with a gift for languages, is a hard nut to crack, so thick is the protective shell she acquired after the mysterious death of her twin sister when they were 16. Claudia had just given birth to a daughter, father unidentified. Shortly thereafter, Renata's father also dies, her mother loses her mind, and Renata ends up raising her niece only to have the child disappear. All this pain keeps Renata on guard against intimacy, even with her kind lover, Jack, until 9/11 delivers another motherless girl to her doorstep. Schwartz evokes in electrifying detail the deep shock felt in the wake of the attacks, intuiting the psychological and spiritual dimensions of everyone's obsession with TV coverage, the creation of "impromptu memorials," and the longing to return to normal routines. But this is also a richly nuanced love story, a tale of earned trust and courageous receptivity in a time of fanaticism and war.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
