This novel, set in small-town America in 1950, follows 19 year-old Grace Dowell through a period of confusion, both in love and in relationships with the people she has known all her life. Diana O'Hehir turned to teaching literature after a brief career in the labour movement. She is the author of two books of poetry and has received several awards.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Set a decade after the time she evoked so well in I Wish This War Were Over, O'Hehir's accomplished second novel is based in the small, rural Northern California community of French Ford, in Reno and in other places that are invested with personalities as distinctive as those of the idiosyncratic cast of characters. In fact, O'Hehir is especially skilled at conveying, with nostalgia, what it was like to live in small California towns in the 1950s. The dominant family in French Ford are the "rich and crazy" Dowells, one of whom is 19-year-old Grace, the narrator of this sorrow-tinged tale. All the Dowells are eccentric: great-aunt Sybil lives in her antique Buick and flagrantly steals for the fun of it; cousin Steve is neurotic, unstable, filled with unexplained despair; newly married cousin Indiana commits suicide, on the day the novel opens. Grace, who has been in love with Steve since she was a child, is unofficially engaged to him, but Indiana's death sets off a series of events that make her flee the sanctuary of home and family until she can come to grips with her new knowledge of Steve and her future. O'Hehir immediately establishes an air of portent and flags Steve as the evil character, and young David McCracken, scion of the other important French Ford family, as his opposite. But Grace wavers between the two until a violent turn of events makes a seer's prophecy come true. O'Hehir writes gracefully and sensitively, and the novel attains a mythic quality, as though the characters are working out their inevitable fates. But because Steve remains a murky character, his malevolent essence superimposed rather than convincingly revealed, the narrative does not attain the gripping emotional impact of O'Hehir's earlier work. It is, however, a book to enjoy for its clear and well-paced prose, and its wonderful small vignettes: scenes in a carny show, a ghost town, an abandoned mine.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Grace Dowell, 19, is planning to marry her cousin Steve, when she learns of the suicide of another cousin. This news, coupled with the reappearance of a long-forgotten childhood acquaintance, pushes Grace away from her tiny northern California hometown and toward an overdue examination of her numerous relationships. The novel, set in 1950, makes its various points about love and loyalty in such a subtle fashion that some elements of the story remain unclear. What emotional impact the book makes comes well after reading it. On the positive side, O'Hehir's skills as a poet account for her economical use of language, and she has a fine sense of the rhythms of everyday conversation. She is the author of I Wish This War Were Over . Lonnie Beene, West Texas State Univ. Lib., Canyon
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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