About the Author

Jill Bialosky received an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University, as well as an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of two books of poetry, and her poems and essays appear regularly in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Redbook, among others. An editor at W. W. Norton, she lives in New York with her husband and son.

Product Description

This first novel by a celebrated American poet is a story of mothers and daughters, of sexual identity, and of a family disintegrating after the premature death of its patriarch. Anna Crane, soon to be married, reflects on her childhood in Ohio during the 1960s and '70s with her two sisters and Lilly, her charismatic, self-destructing mother. Lilly is consumed by memories of her late husband and spends her days dreamily creating paper menageries or preparing for dates with a stream of suitors. Evoking the claustrophobia of small-town life, the novel races toward a chilling conclusion when Anna is betrayed by the two most important figures in her young life.

Not since Alice McDermott's That Night has there been such a telling portrait of first love. And not since Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here have we witnessed the destructive, seductive nature of a mother who insists on competing with her children.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bialosky is an editor at Norton, already esteemed as a poet (Subterranean), and this lacerating first novel bears many traces of a poet's imagery and concentration. It is the story of a mother with three young daughters, devastated by the accidental death of her husband and the toll it takes on all their lives. Hardest hit is the mother, insecure but sexually enticing Lilly Crane, whose dreamy self-regard quickly turns rancid. She spends hours primping for new boyfriends, enters into a hasty and doomed second marriage and gradually, as her romantic disasters accumulate, withdraws into sleep and forgetfulness. It is a terrifying portrait, drawn with a fierce mix of love, regret and open-eyed candor. Her 15-year-old daughter Anna, the narrator, has many crosses to bear; apart from worrying about her sisters, 14-year-old Louise and 16-year-old Ruthie, both of whom find their own uneasy escapes from an intolerable situation, she suffers the agonies of a first love with a boy she depends on until she gradually realizes he is more fragile than she is. These relationships, drawn with great subtlety and an almost Lawrentian poetry and sensuality, are at the heart of the book, but the setting - suburban Cleveland in the '60s and '70s - is also evoked with telling detail and a wondrous sense of the difficulties of endurance. The central image, of a life almost stifled out of existence, is brilliantly maintained, and the ultimate effect of the book is to evoke a powerful sense of life's infinite mysteries, flourishing amid its squalors and terrors.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Poet Bialosky (Subterranean) perfectly captures the confusion, passion, and pain of teenage love in her first novel. Anna Crane narrates the story of her childhood during the Sixties and Seventies, when she lived in a small Ohio town. During high school, she falls in love with Austin, a boy who works as a groom and trainer at the horse track. But this novel is not just another saga of teen love; it is also the story of Anna's two sisters and, most dramatically, of their mother's desperate and self-destructive race to look beautiful, go out on dates, and remarry after the early death of her first husband. When the parallel romances of mother and daughter converge, this haunting and powerful novel ends with a shattering realization. The characters are original and clearly defined, the story is well paced and plotted, and the writing is poetic and lyrical. This stunning fictional debut is recommended for all public libraries. Yvette W. Olson, City Univ. Lib., Bellevue, WA

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

When their father died, 4-year-old Anna Crane and her two sisters lost their sense of security that comes with the certainty of routines and traditions. To Anna's bereft mother, who at first confined herself to the house, cutting out magazine images of what she thought a life should look like, a life was worthless without a man to love, and so she sets out to find the girls a father in a reckless succession of dates, often leaving them alone at night in her shameless quest for validation. Anna grows to be an introspective young woman who becomes a mediator in a family torn apart by despondency and the absence of love. When she becomes involved in a tender relationship with a boy, he, too, begins a downward spiral that eerily resembles the abandonment and darkness she experiences at home. Bialosky's haunting first novel aches with the sensitivity of a soulful girl who is discovering love, sexuality, and the pain of unsurpassable betrayal. Elsa Gaztambide

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Stunning." --Glamour

-- Review

Review

"Artful. A quiet stepsister to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm."-The New York Times Book Review

"Lucid, finely crafted. Captures the purity and desperation of adolescent love." -Los Angeles Times

"An elegiac novel." -The Washington Post

"Stunning." --Glamour