Perfectly San Francisco.A Seahorse Year * Stacey D'Erasmo * Houghton Mifflin Houghton Mifflin Company is a leading educational publisher in the United States. The company's headquarters is located in Boston's Back Bay. It publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers * $24 You could read Stacey D'Erasmo for the subtlety sub·tle·ty n. pl. sub·tle·ties 1. The quality or state of being subtle. 2. Something subtle, especially a nicety of thought or a fine distinction. of her insights or the beauty of her language or for her tumbling, shifting arrangements of plot and characters, like pieces of a puzzle that can be solved in different ways. Or you could just open A Seahorse Year and be mesmerized. While her new novel is more ambitious than her well-received debut, Tea, with a larger cast of characters and more complicated issues (gay families, long-term relationships, secrets, madness), it has the same attention to detail and the same heady head·y adj. head·i·er, head·i·est 1. a. Intoxicating or stupefying: heady liqueur. b. combination of close focus and narrative sweep. Nan is a middle-aged book-selling dyke whose partner, Marina, is having an affair and whose teenage son, Christopher, has bolted from home, in the first clear manifestation of mental illness. With the horrible logic of the heart, Christopher's accountant father, Hal, falls in love with a new man at the same time he is losing his son to schizophrenia schizophrenia (skĭt'səfrē`nēə), group of severe mental disorders characterized by reality distortions resulting in unusual thought patterns and behaviors. . D'Erasmo is as much a sociologist as a stylist, and her observations of this particular moment in gay San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden are so true to life that you will gasp (or groan) with recognition. |
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