Bridge of Sand [Hardcover]

Janet Burroway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 2009

In this beautifully written novel, Burroway uses a woman’s personal loss, coincident with 9/11, to explore race, territory, and renewal.

Dana, the widow of a Pennsylvania senator, buries her husband the morning of 9/11, only miles from the United 93 crash. After months of paralysis, she sells her house and heads south in an effort to pick up the lost strands of her youth.

Finding that her grandmother’s house is now gone, replaced by a strip mall, she phones an old acquaintance. Cassius Huston is black, separated from a harridan of a wife, and devoted to his three-year-old daughter.Much to their surprise, Cassius and Dana fall in love. But when Dana is threatened by Cassius’s family, she flees to the Gulf Coast, where she finally finds herself, and her life, in a place and culture she never could have anticipated.

Set amid the blur of 9/11, this wise, beautifully written novel of love, race, territory, and renewal explores the issues that challenge us all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Burroway is best known for her textbook, Writing Fiction, but in this novel she demonstrates that even skillful writers can stumble. On September 11, 2001, Dana Cleveland sees a distant column of smoke through the window of the limousine carrying her to her husbands funeral. Shell later learn the smoke was from Flight 93, providing the first of many invocations of 9/11 that serve no purpose other than to undermine what would otherwise be a decent novel. Dana leaves Pennsylvania to revisit her roots, and while searching out her grandmothers home in Georgia, she hooks up with childhood infatuation Cassius Huston, who is black, separated from his wife, has a daughter and belongs to a large family who would not approve of Dana, who is white. When the wife threatens Dana, she flees to Pelican Bay, Fla., where she quickly becomes entrenched in the mostly working-class community and grapples with problems that test her in ways she's never anticipated. The complexities of Dana's and Cassius's relationship and of Pelican Bay are finely wrought, but Burroways exploration of socioeconomic angst is marred by the novels ghoulis'h references to 9/11. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* By strange chance, her Pennsylvania senator husband’s funeral takes place on 9/11 within site of the smoking wreckage of United 93. As the country goes into shock, Dana, 38, sheds her high-profile, low-satisfaction life, takes to the highway, and returns to a small Georgia town where she lived briefly as a teenager and harbored a crush on an African American co-worker. She and Cassius now fall wildly in love, but malevolent forces drive them apart. Fleeing to Florida’s Gulf Coast, Dana soon finds herself tangled up in a web of shameful secrets, schemes, and betrayals. Burroway, known best for her popular creative-writng guides, revels in the beauty and dangers of hurricane country, where racial, class, and sexual conflicts surge and boil. With a possum in the kitchen, a snake in a piano, and a trailer-swallowing sinkhole, Dana, a brilliantly drawn character of conviction and adaptability, forges a surprising new identity. Suspense mingles with insight in this sensuous novel as Burroway reminds us that we can’t extract ourselves from the wider world, that everything is always in flux, and that to survive, one must hold on to kindness, fairness, and love. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (March 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151015430
• ISBN-13: 978-0151015436
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,512,273 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful read!, May 28, 2009

By 

Lynne Taetzsch (Ithaca, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bridge of Sand (Hardcover)

I was quickly caught up in the life of the main character, Dana, and ready to travel with her as she recreated her life. Each character felt true, engaging, and particular. I loved the enactment of friendship between Dana and Phoebe, who is the voice of reason and comfort throughout the novel. I felt Dana's passion, her disappointments, and her resilience as she struggles to find community, meaningful work, and commitment in her life.

Dana's story alone is worth the read, but we also discover a finely wrought exploration of racial tensions in the south. This exploration is never generalized, exaggerated, or preachy. It is simply part and parcel of the life of these people, in these times, in this place.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I truly hope there is a sequel., May 9, 2009

By 

Linda G. Kiedrowski (Wisconsin, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bridge of Sand (Hardcover)

It took me just a bit to warm up to this book because I didn't understand the attraction to Cassius. However, I have to say that this was one of the best books I have read. Even though it is just over 300 pages, it feels like a saga. The characters are real and certainly not perfect. The author's style is wonderful even though sometimes she takes a bit of literary license with vocabulary. This is fine because I like to be challenged when I read. I thought her research into the mills, pianos and Florida strata added a level to this book. I really loved the main character, Trudy, Bernadette, Herbie, Luther and even Adena. This book explores racism in the most basic terms. It is not a big movement but rather explored on a one to one basis through real people. The author's use of commonplace situations (fishing, clerking in a store, dining with the locals, etc.) to explore the human side helped make this book very warm. I ended up really feeling attached to the characters and wondering where they will go in their lives. Thank you for a wonderful trip and I hope to see these characters again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Janet Burroway's Bridge of Sand, June 17, 2009

By 

Doris Friedensohn (Leonia, NJ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bridge of Sand (Hardcover)

It's not everyday that I read a contemporary novel that satisfies me and nourishes me as fully as Janet Burroway's BRIDGE OF SAND. As a reader, I value complexity of characterization and social milieu. I appreciate what characters come to understand about themselves and their choices -- and the ways in which they are creatures of history, culture and their human frailties.

BRIDGE OF SAND revolves around Dana, a 40 year old white woman, newly widowed after a disappointing marriage to a US Senator. Desperate for a new and dense taste of life, she falls in love with Cassius, a black factory worker whom she knew slightly as a teenager. After their initial passion (in Virginia), Dana retreats to the West Coast of Florida, where an aunt of Cassius lives, to wait for a signal from her lover. Through a combination of accident and choice, she takes over Solly's Corner, a small town general store. In that unlikely role, among whites and blacks of varied social backgrounds, she constructs her world.

I love Dana's gumption and acts of devotion to the new people around her. I resonate to her uncertainties about belonging and the power of feeling. I resonate to her sturdy friendship with Phoebe, a smart lawyer from her former life in Pennsylvania - - and to the importance of shared frames of reference as a basis for friendship. I also resonate to the bond she forges with Trudy, Cassius' aunt, who had been the lover of the white owner of the general store. The human landscape of Solly's Corner is vivid, fresh, and at moments heart-stopping. The physical landscape --including the sun scorched beach and a home-wrecking tornado - - reverberates powerfully in this environment of surprise, comfort and disorder.

Dana, pregnant with Cassius' child, whom she vows to raise with Trudy's help, signals that we have moved into Obama Time. Cassius, after a doomed visit with Dana, makes his way West, reminding us that we are are not yet in Post Racial America. But we are in a transitional moment, with the old racial fears and suspicions in new forms, with healing and no healing.

The wisdom of Burroway's novel is in the recognition of limitations. Dana and Cassius are circumscribed by earlier choices but not defeated. Dana can embrace her bi-racial child even though Cassius will be out of the picture. Cassius can embrace freedom from his crazy wife and narrow community of blacks as long as he doesn't sacrifice his young daughter (who rejected Dana the moment she saw her). Dana's unborn child and Cassius' four year old have parallel paths to more liberated American futures. But each requires sacrifices by a loving adult. Dana and Cassius cannot have it all. None of us can have it all -- assuming we know what "all" is. All is hubris. All is ridiculous. Making peace with less than all is grace -- and graceful.