From Publishers Weekly
The narrator of Ciment's quirky, sometimes funny, lyrical but disappointing love story is 15 when she falls for a kind widower 30 years her senior: Arthur accidentally rams his car into the trailer in which Kim and her loopy mom, Gloria, live. Kim's life has been bedlam; Gloria sells mail-order aphrodisiac perfumes, canine treadmills, weight-reducing solvents and other harebrained products while keeping constantly on the move in order to evade angry customers, the Food and Drug Administration and the postmaster general. Mother and daughter briefly join Arthur at his rented house in California, but when his relationship with Kim approaches the sexual, he flees. Several years later, after Kim has graduated from UC-Berkeley, she and Arthur meet again and become lovers, and she moves in with him. Meanwhile, Gloria's entrepreneurial world collapses, and in 1969 she crash-lands into their blissful household. Ciment ( Small Claims ) doesn't tell us enough about Kim's feelings or her sexual rivalry with her mother. Kim never comments on the age difference between herself and the too-gracious and considerate Arthur; their May-September union is simply a given. The offbeat ending, which telescopes the next 25 years, is anticlimactic and unconvincing.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Gloria Gail, entrepreneur and merchant of aphrodisiacs, has spent her life creating illusions to convince buyers--and herself--that fantasy can be reality. "I am not dealing with the banal arithmetic of earning a couple of bucks," she boasts. "I am dealing with the aerodynamics of human dreams." One stormy night, Gloria and her teenage daughter, Kim, are involved in an auto accident. The man in the other car, a kindly widower named Arthur, allows Gloria to convalesce in his home, where Kim develops a crush on him. Gloria recruits Arthur for one of her business schemes; he invests a substantial amount of money and, having discovered that he is falling in love with Kim, flees. Ciment ( Small Claims , LJ 10/15/86) has a strong central premise in her notion of Gloria as a vendor of dreams, and she writes movingly of first love, but she spoils her narrative with jarring shifts from first- to third-person perspective. A marginal purchase.
- Kimberly G. Allen, National Assn. of Home Builders Lib., Washington, D.C.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
