An anthology of short stories celebrates women coming of age and finding a niche in the world and narrates these transformations from an insider's perspective. By the author of Stories from Mesa Country.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The Garden of Eden isn't lost to us forever; women and men are just too caught up in making compromises and trading true feeling for security to see our way back in. That's the theme of this lyrical, if overly self-conscious, collection of 12 stories. Using the powers of nature and a little intuitive wisdom, Coleman tells us, it is humanly possible to reclaim lost innocence. In "Windfall" a woman escapes the city and a stifling relationship to find a simpler happiness (and a better man) on the farm of her birth; in "Glasnost" a crabbed English professor recovers the exuberance of youth on a wintry Brighton Beach boardwalk. Yet realization doesn't guarantee salvation in these tales--many of Coleman's characters never figure out how to reverse their falls from grace. In "The Age of Insects" a young mother comes across a beached whale and only feels helpless in the face of people's petty responses: "She remembered reading somewhere that we live in the age of insects, outnumbered. . . ." Coleman is at her best when describing the sensuality of nature, from ponds "where goldfish quivered like streaks of sunlight" to fields of poppies "that fluttered and swayed and nodded their crimson heads as we passed." Such poetic touches redeem this collection from the limbo of introspection where its characters want to linger.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Coleman's second collection (after Stories from Mesa Country, 1991): mostly delicate explorations of the passage of adolescents into adulthood and of married women into the complexities of adultery or disenchantment. In the first section here, ``The Balducci Garden,'' the narrator of the title story comes of age sexually by voyeuristically observing the Balducci brothers who live next door to her grandmother. The central metaphor is an apt one--the narrator breaks stones apart to find ``the hidden beauty'' of their crystalline centers. This sort of metaphor-cum-sketch is the dominant pattern here--Coleman relies on her poetic prose to carry readers instead of fully developing her plots--and, usually, it works. In the second section, ``The Age of Insects,'' the title story is about a woman who, along with her husband, baby, and shallow mother-in-law, comes upon a beached whale and learns of the callousness of humans. In ``The Lover of Swamps,'' a poet--married to a naturalist but in love with someone else--develops ``an affinity with the swamp.'' In ``Glasnost,'' a woman of 40 comes to see how she's ``lived more than half [her] life as a robot.'' The third section, ``Wives and Lovers,'' begins with the delicate story of a sculptor who falls in love with a woman in a house where he's a temporary guest and who learns from her how to see. In ``Compromising Alice,'' Alice, after 15 years of marriage to jerk George, divorces him to consider whether or not to marry thoughtful Henry. And ``La Signora Julia'' is about a famous physicist's student who develops a crush on the man's wife and meditates on how incompatible people manage to stay together before learning, later, that the man's wife has left him. Coleman, at best, displays the easy poetic grace of an Alice Munro. Even when sketchy, her lyricism usually saves the day. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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