From Publishers Weekly
Despite stylistic defects, Schweighardt handles complex emotional issues with some skill in her provocative debut novel about two couples and a crippled adolescent vacationing on an unnamed island as a severe hurricane approaches. College professor Donald Bartlett is a poet who has lost his inspiration and hopes that his young second wife will precipitate the muse's return. The family, including Donald's teenage daughter Meredith, who was born with no feet, is joined by Donald's old friends Roscoe, whose juggling and sword-swallowing routines attract nightly crowds back in Key West, and Belinda, a beautician who works her magic at a nursing home. Everything here is fraught with significance: the storm mirrors the inner turbulence of the players; Meredith's physical imperfections reflect the adults' spiritual deformities; and the setting evokes Prospero and Miranda, as do the characters' concerns with art and artifice. Schweighardt's brief but heavily symbolic work is best read as a modern fable which asks how people variously evade or embrace disaster.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
First novelist Schweighardt can't seem to decide whether she wants to be campy, avant-garde, or highbrow. Her styles mix about as well as her characters, five people vacationing on an island about to be hit by a hurricane. Carole, the butterfly-tattooed waitress, weds Donald, the literary professor without writing ability, because she wants to become pregnant. The marriage makes her stepmother to Meredith, a suicidal, footless teenager who thinks she's a mermaid. Roscoe, a street musician, and Belinda, a beautician whose nursing home clients sport Tina Turner coiffures, round out the vacation party. Drab opening chapters, narrated by morose Meredith and dull Donald, eventually give way to more lively storytelling as the characters ponder their inner secrets, but the ending is unresolved and perplexing. Not a strong candidate for fiction collections.
- Heather Blenkinsopp, Mercy Coll. Lib., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Heather Blenkinsopp, Mercy Coll. Lib., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
