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Overview
Long out of print, Rebecca Brown’s brilliant debut novel explores the psychic repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic family, and the ways in which one woman’s past continues to inform and inhabit her life. Robin Daley’s childhood is dominated by a sense of impermanence: Her hard-drinking father disappears as suddenly and unexpectedly as he arrives. Her adulthood offers an escape, but strange things happen when the dark corners and locked rooms of family life are revealed.
Rebecca Brown is the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, and The End of Youth. She lives in Seattle.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In one stifling moment near the beginning of this strong, evocative first novel, its genesis is laid bare: little Robin Dale's father slides her into a pool, steps away and, moving backward, hands outstretched, says, ``Try to reach me.'' Robin spends the rest of her life trying to grab hold of her father, a Navy pilot who moves his family from one small-town airbase to another every few years, while he flies off to cities with exotic names and plenty of bars. When drinking loses him his job, he sits at home, for once, filling Robin's head with tales of his heroism, turning her into his copilot. But he drifts away again, and Robin is left with her mother and small brother. After high school, she wins a scholarship to study abroad. When she comes home, it is to a transformed and unreachable mother, now a movie star who goes on location to far-away places, where Robin follows, never quite catching up. Finally Robin settles down with her lover, Carrie. But bizarre events occur in the house that they are restoring. At the novel's close, Robin is in the pool again, reaching for her father, drowning in the haunted house of memory. (January)Feminist Bookstore News
Exceptionally well written.—Carol Seajay
London Times
Here is a real new voice--ripe and imaginative, often funny, and sliding craftily between fact and fantasy.Library Journal
This 1986 title follows protagonist Robin Daley and the psychological ghosts that haunt her life after growing up with an alcoholic father.
—Michael Rogers