From Publishers Weekly
With extraordinary imagination and language, Labrador marks the debut of an unusual talent. On the surface a novel about the complex relationship between two sisters, it is also a frequently funny and often confounding tale that leaps from angels to demons and from ordinary life in a New Hampshire household to wild and enigmatic fables beyond all time and place. Willie, the older sister, is strikingly beautiful but contrary, and not the least bit sweet. She is a graceful dancer who grows to loathe her family"Mr. Noodle, the Mouse Queen, and Little Kitty." Kitty, a too-tall loner, becomes more and more accustomed to reinventing the world rather than confronting it. Often left at the mercy of the eccentric and superstitious Irish housekeeper, Kitty creates a cast of characters that inhabits her imagination. The feature player is Rogni, a somewhat inept angel, whose stories help Kitty to tune out her father's drinking and her mother's incompetence. When a long-lost grandfather appears, Kitty finds the approval and warmth she has long craved from a blood relation. She is so taken with the old man that she agrees to travel to the far reaches of Labrador, where he lives in primitive style with a woman of whom no one in the family approves. The events that follow, like one of Rogni's fables, are fantastic and bizarre. This is a mysterious, magical book, brimming with haunting images.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
This off-center novel of two sisters coming of age in 1960s New Hampshire is filled with dark, brooding images and disjointed adolescent perspectives, but the story never quite seems to materialize. Younger sister Kitty is in awe of her lovely, spirited older sister, Willie, who yearns to break free from their drab home life. Kitty escapes in her own way, leaving home with a long-lost grandfather to remote Labrador in a fantasy-like sequence barely connected to the rest of the story. Ambitious, and fairly successful in the interior landscapes of adolescence portrayed, this is nevertheless a first novel with more promise than substance. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
