Jenny and Amanda Ruth were best friends in a small Alabama town until eighteen-years-old Amanda Ruth was murdered. Now, fourteen years later, Jenny has traveled with her husband to China to scatter Amanda Ruth’s ashes and finally fulfill her friend’s dream of visiting her Chinese father’s homeland. It’s also, Jenny hopes, an opportunity to repair her own troubled marriage. But as she journeys through a foreign landscape, the guilty secrets of Jenny’s past rise up and her life will be inexorably altered.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog (“Highly recommended [for fans of] authors like Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard” —Library Journal, starred review) and No One You Know (“Luminous . . . will keep you thinking long after the last page has been turned”—Family Circle), Michelle Richmond’s stunning novel captivates with its depiction of the powerful intimacies of marriage, friendship, and family that shape our paths and the bonds of home that buoy us—wherever home may be.
Richmond's sophomore novel (after The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress) is a bleak melodrama about a young woman's prolonged grief over the death of her best friend and former lover. Twelve years have passed since college student Amanda Ruth was brutally murdered, and her sidekick Jenny has yet to recover. Jenny and her estranged husband, Dave, take a cruise on the Yangtze to scatter Amanda Ruth's ashes in the homeland of Amanda's Chinese father. Although Jenny wants to save her marriage, she rather coolly trashes it by becoming intimate with Graham, a cruise passenger who, despite suffering the final throes of Lou Gehrig's disease, manages to show Jenny around and teach her about the environmental perils facing China. Jenny's relationship with Graham takes a dark-and implausible-turn when she learns of his wish to commit suicide. Through it all, she continually relives her friendship and adolescent romance with Amanda Ruth. Her obsession with the young woman leads her to engage in troubling behavior, propelling the plot into a moral wasteland where the environment becomes the object of desire and human life is casually snuffed out. Richmond's prose tends to run purple, especially during Jenny's brooding monologues, which dominate the book ("I gaze into the dark depths of the river, looking for some reflection of the woman I am now.... But the river is opaque, and my vision is blurred"). Though Richmond poses provocative questions about grief and desire, the shallow characters and sensational plot twists don't allow her to explore them in much depth. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Michelle Richmond grew up in Mobile, Alabama, earned her Bachelors degree from The University of Alabama, and after college lived in several Southern cities before attending the University Miami as a James Michener Fellow.
After receiving her MFA in Creative Writing in Miami, she lived in New York City for a couple of years before settling in San Francisco, where she has made her home ever since. Her first book, a collection of linked stories entitled THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2001. The collection is now available for Kindle. Her debut novel, DREAM OF THE BLUE ROOM, was published in 2003, followed by THE YEAR OF FOG (2007) and NO ONE YOU KNOW (2008).
THE YEAR OF FOG went on to become a New York Times bestseller, as well as a major bestseller in France, and to be published in ten languages, earning accolades from newspapers around the globe. Now in its 21st paperback printing, The Year of Fog is the 2011 selection of Silicon Valley Reads, which brings 15 Bay Area cities together to read one book.
Richmond has received the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Associated Writing Programs Award, and the Mississippi Review Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Playboy, The Missouri Review, the Kenyon Review, Best American Fantasy, and many other magazines and anthologies. She is currently at work on her next novel, which will be publshed by Bantam in 2011.
From the author: "For me, a novel always begins with a place and a character, and unfolds from there. My first two books, the linked story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress and the novel Dream of the Blue Room, are rooted in the Southern landscape of my childhood. Without the place out of which they grew, those books would not exist.
Likewise, my subsequent books--The Year of Fog and No One You Know--could, in my mind, only take place in the San Francisco Bay Area. San Francisco has been my home for a decade. It's the place that fills my days and my imagination, and it inevitably finds its way into my novels. It's also the city in which I am raising my child, which, to me, makes it home.
Wherever you live, and whatever your geographical sensibilities may be, I imagine we share some literary sensibilities...and that a shared loved of storytelling is what brought you to this page. No One You Know is about storytelling, in much the same way that The Year of Fog is about memory. As for the next book, due out from Bantam next year, I'm trying not to talk about it too much. Call me superstitious, but I like to keep a story under wraps until the proofs are at the printer."
An adventure through a tortured soul. Richmond is expert in developing the drama that exposes the sensual desires that Jenny still feels for her lost lover. The fantastic plot turns left me in suspense and wanting more, and more, and more....Not only does Richmond create a vivid drama of the past, but also brings the painful realities of her current relationship with her husband to abrupt confrontation. Jenny's anguish, and attemtps to find emotional escape through her physcial rather than emotional relationships with others, added to the excitement of this artful novel. I can not wait until Richmond's next work comes out, nor until Dream of the Blue Room hits the big screen.
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I really enjoyed reading this novel but what kept me going was wondering how the death of Amanda Ruth was going to be resolved. Did the main character do it? Would there be a confession, or was it some unexpected person or the girl's Chinese father. The problem is that nothing ever really happened. Nothing was resolved. I was disappointed with the ending, with everything hanging up in the air, people left with other strangers, trying to drudge up something, but never really having it come to the surface.
The writing was interesting. The short paragraphs and chapters helped to propel me through the book, but my opinion is that there was no real story here, just a listing of feelings, observations and events. I agree with other reviewers about the delightful dream-like quality of some portions of the book.
I was also disappointed with the depth of her observations on China. I mean, I was hoping to actually learn something, to come away with something I didn't know before, but no. I got about the same amount of info that I'd get from reading a Wikipedia piece or some travel book.
Maybe I'm being too harsh, but I gave it 4 stars, and I'm not related ...
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