Product Description

Two lifetime friends and partners struggle to make sense of their lives in the rural hills of western Massachusetts when discord enters their marriage. Reprint."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #977457 in Books
• Published on: 1991-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Poignant and atmospheric, this book honors the promise of Lucid Stars , Barrett's well-received first novel. Charismatic Reba Dwyer, flanked and buttressed by brother Hank, a shy, late bloomer, sister Tonia, who has Down's Syndrome, and best friend Luke Wyatt, hangs out in meager Massachusetts hill country until she meets Jessie Thayer, a girl with framed pictures on her walls, matching linens and dotted-swiss bedspreads. Ignoring past alliances, Reba joins Jessie in disreputable escapades and, when the friendship flounders, escapes to urban respectability. But her fellow conservatory students find Reba oddly feral, so, when she is summoned home because her father has left, Reba embraces her heritage, becomes pregnant, marries Luke, and has shallow affairs to distract herself from the fact that, like her father, who absorbs life as sounds, she must come to terms with inner music. Elegant, accessible writing transforms Reba's potentially trite passage from self-denial to self-acceptance into fine reading. First serial to Mademoiselle.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"Just sing the melody, Reba had said. I'll pick up the harmony. But he couldn't sing." So there will be neither melody nor harmony in her marriage with Luke, her best friend from childhood. Reba, who hears the wind sing in A-minor chords and the radiator hum in E, cannot hear the devotion or pain in the voice of her husband. Beginning with a marvelous evocation of autumn in New England and an eccentric, musical family, the book segues into just another story about a self-centered, cheating wife. Even her host of whimsical, lovable relatives cannot quite save Reba--or the book. What a disappointment, especially after Barrett's successful debut with Lucid Stars ( LJ 10/1/89).
- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

a novel in the higher range
I was transported by this story of Reba, the musically gifted daughter of a musically gifted chicken farmer. Yes, the setting is rough; the towns are small, the people are poor, but there is huge beauty in this small setting. So many plot elements affected me; her early years singing in church while stoned on hash, the story of her pregnancy, her painful relationship with her lonely brother, her self-expiating string of affairs with married men.

Reba's lovers see her as a naive poor girl, easy pickings, not important. She's exploited in a painfully real way, seduced as much by their privilege as by their sexual advances. Novels that include an examination of the American class structure make me uncomfortable. I think that's the point.

But this isn't polemic; it's a lovely and realistic story. The peripheral characters, mostly her family members, are sketched in all their weird beauty; a sister with Down's syndrome who writes a poetic epic, her lonely brother, barely able to master his own desire for Reba, her absent father, her mechanical mother.

I don't know anything about musical theory, about scales and chords, but this novel actually communicated how the world is percieved by the musically oriented. This novel is beautifully-written without ever becoming self-consciously poetic. Every word in here works.

Is that it?
My biggest complaint about this book is that the end leaves you hanging on. There is no good closure. Usually i like to have a sense of conclusion, but this has to be one of the most abrupt endings i recall.

I don't particularly like to read about this topic, depressed economy and uneducated people trying to make ends meet while drinking heavily (a personal bias of mine), but someone else might find the book some virtues.