Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Here is a collection of stories about women who have arrived at awkward edges in their lives. Some are adolescents, some at the brink of old age, and some find themselves suddenly ill or pregnant. Others come to the abrupt discovery that their marriages are not as whole as they had believed, while a few tumble onto startling secrets. But despite their range in age and situation, they all try to use their new knowledge to stitch together a fresh pattern by which to live. While most of the action unfolds along the East Coast - in Maryland, Maine, Boston, Philadelphia, New York - several of the women travel to Arizona, California, and Jamaica. Often the light is too bright in these glittery places and they wonder why they have come. Many seem to be searching for a sense of home, which one girl describes as a place that is "complete and full of longing all at once."Synopsis
Here is a collection of stories about women who have arrived at awkward edges in their lives. Some are adolescents, some at the brink of old age, and some find themselves suddenly ill or pregnant. Others come to the abrupt discovery that their marriages are not as whole as they had believed, while a few tumble onto startling secrets. But despite their range in age and situation, they all try to use their new knowledge to stitch together a fresh pattern by which to live. While most of the action unfolds along the East Coast - in Maryland, Maine, Boston, Philadelphia, New York - several of the women travel to Arizona, California, and Jamaica. Often the light is too bright in these glittery places and they wonder why they have come. Many seem to be searching for a sense of home, which one girl describes as a place that is "complete and full of longing all at once."
Publishers Weekly
A consistent, sure voice and recurring images (uncontrolled dogs, uncommunicative sisters, unhinged minds, unorthodox Thanksgivings) unite these 11 stories, which range more freely across geography than across thematic boundaries. Most are coming-of-age tales, with the exception of two of the most powerful, "Open Season" and the title story. In the former, reminiscent of Ellen Gilchrist's work, a 10-year-old girl and her family travel on Thanksgiving to the Maryland estate of "the Laird," as her unemployed father refers to his overbearing Scottish father-in-law. In the latter, a 14-year-old girl takes a private vow of silence when she moves to the "very private state" of Maine. A pregnant Bostonian goes whale-watching in the collection's best story, "Pacific." The whales' migrationa "giving in to biology"and the directionlessness of the beached whales prove instructional for the unmarried womanand, by a kind of suggestion, for the single pregnant woman in "Monsoon," another entry here. The loops of meaning coil from story to story, creating a memorable whole that transcends the sum of its parts. (Nov.) FYI: Bacon won the 1996 Associated Writing Programs Award for Short Fiction. "Live Free or Die," a story in this collection, won the 1996 Pirate's Alley/Faulkner Society Award for Best Short Story.