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Body, Mind & Health - Fiction, Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Phases of Life - Fiction
Undressing the Moon by T. Greenwood β€” book cover

Undressing the Moon

by T. Greenwood
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Overview

Dark and compassionate, graceful yet raw, Undressing the Moon explores the seams between childhood and adulthood, between love and loss...

At thirty, Piper Kincaid feels too young to be dying. Cancer has eaten away her strength; she'd be alone but for a childhood friend who's come home by chance. Yet with all the questions of her future before her, she's adrift in the past, remembering the fateful summer she turned fourteen and her life changed forever.

Her nervous father's job search seemed stalled for good, as he hung around the house watching her mother's every move. What he and Piper had both dreaded at last came to pass: Her restless, artistic mother, who smelled of lilacs and showed Piper beauty, finally left.

With no one to rely on, Piper struggled to hold on to what was important. She had a brother who loved her and a teacher enthralled with her potential. But her mother's absence, her father's distance, and a volatile secret threatened her delicate balance.

Now Piper is once again left with the jagged pieces of a shattered life. If she is ever going to put herself back together, she'll have to begin with the summer that broke them all...

"Undressing the Moon beautifully elucidates the human capacity to maintain grace under unrelenting fire." β€”Los Angeles Times

Synopsis

Dark and compassionate, graceful yet raw, Undressing the Moon explores the seams between childhood and adulthood, between love and loss. . .

At thirty, Piper Kincaid feels too young to be dying. Cancer has eaten away her strength; she'd be alone but for a childhood friend who's come home by chance. Yet with all the questions of her future before her, she's adrift in the past, remembering the fateful summer she turned fourteen and her life changed forever.

Her nervous father's job search seemed stalled for good, as he hung around the house watching her mother's every move. What he and Piper had both dreaded at last came to pass: Her restless, artistic mother, who smelled of lilacs and showed Piper beauty, finally left.

With no one to rely on, Piper struggled to hold on to what was important. She had a brother who loved her and a teacher enthralled with her potential. But her mother's absence, her father's distance, and a volatile secret threatened her delicate balance.

Now Piper is once again left with the jagged pieces of a shattered life. If she is ever going to put herself back together, she'll have to begin with the summer that broke them all. . .

"Undressing the Moon beautifully elucidates the human capacity to maintain grace under unrelenting fire." --Los Angeles Times

About the Author, T. Greenwood

T. Greenwood
T. Greenwood is the author of Breathing Water, Nearer Than the Sky, and Undressing the Moon, the latter two both Booksense 76 picks. She has received grants from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and, most recently, the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She lives with her husband and their two daughters in the D.C. area, where she is also an aspiring fine arts photographer.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Piper Kincaid is 30 years old and has already endured three years of treatment for breast cancer. As she considers life with metastatic breast disease, she also returns to the year she was 14, when her mother left and she came to understand how lives get broken. In Greenwood's third novel (after Breathing Water and Nearer Than the Sky), chapters alternate between Piper's story today and 16 years earlier. Her mother collected broken glass and created beautiful pieces of art, but she couldn't live with her husband's fears of losing her. She managed to get away, leaving Piper and her older brother, Quinn, with their father, who eventually found a new girlfriend and ostensibly moved out. How Piper grew up that year without either parent, how she and her best friend, Becca, discovered performing, and how she became aware of the neediness and cruelty of others intersects with Piper's cancer ordeal. Greenwood uses glass to represent both beauty and baseness, creation and destruction, and life and death. This beautiful story, eloquently told, demands attention. Highly recommended. Bette-Lee Fox, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Book Details

Published
September 28, 2010
Publisher
Kensington Publishing Corporation
Pages
352
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780758238764

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