After the break up of a long-term relationship, forty-something Caroline Traeger must put her life back together. Left alone with her seven-year-old daughter, she desperately searches back through her life for an explanation for her personal failure. Through stories of her adventurous past, she explores love, desire, commitment, and loneliness, comparing her own choices to those of other women she's met along the way. Her journey is ours, re-arranging the pieces of the puzzle that make a meaningful life.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Stories spiral within stories in this meandering, loose-ended tale of lost love by Renek (Spiritland). Carolyn, the 42-year-old narrator, addresses in second-person her longtime lover, a cultural critic of some renown who has recently left her and their seven-year-old daughter, Jenna. Memory and longing mingle as Carolyn unravels her grief: a woman the couple once spotted in Paris becomes, in Carolyn's imagination, a model named Annabella; a young Swiss woman they encountered in Thailand fends off the advances of a pair of Israeli brothers, then gives in to one, then the other and ends up hating herself. Other stories involve memories of old boyfriends, revealing hidden bits of Carolyn's past; in between she allows glimpses into the couple's unhappiness: her lover's dissatisfaction with the constraints of fatherhood, routine and boredom, and the sense that he has simply fallen out of love. Finally, he is allowed to tell his own story, though there's no real suspense or denouement to this brief work that's defined mostly by an inchoate anticipation. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Nava Renek is a feminine voice with a masculine accent, using the double flame of her confession to burn the past and the everyday predictable routine. Written with sensitivity and fairness, this is an invite to stop, think and reshape the gift of living, loving, and creating stars from dust. --Carmen Firan
Renek's voice of quiet questing serves as a forceful infrastructure for her soul-singing poetic luminosity and imaginative shifts in point of view. The result of this experiment of fiction is courageously various, the best kind of fleshly. --Michele Madigan Somerville
Time has a nasty tendency to leave the whys of the matter unanswered. No Perfect Words is a novel looking at the life of Caroline Traeger, struck with a midlife crisis and a seven year old daughter. Unsure of how she got to that point in the first place, she reflects on her life and what she truly believes in and whats out of life. An intrigueing and fascinating story many women will relate to, No Perfect Words is not to be missed. --Mid-West Book Review
Renek's voice of quiet questing serves as a forceful infrastructure for her soul-singing poetic luminosity and imaginative shifts in point of view. The result of this experiment of fiction is courageously various, the best kind of fleshly. --Michele Madigan Somerville
Time has a nasty tendency to leave the whys of the matter unanswered. No Perfect Words is a novel looking at the life of Caroline Traeger, struck with a midlife crisis and a seven year old daughter. Unsure of how she got to that point in the first place, she reflects on her life and what she truly believes in and whats out of life. An intrigueing and fascinating story many women will relate to, No Perfect Words is not to be missed. --Mid-West Book Review
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More About the Author
Nava Renek's short stories and non-fiction have appeared in a number of literary magazines, newspapers, and websites, including www.hipmama.com, www.respiro.org, Zone 3 and The MacGuffin. Her first novel, SPIRITLAND, was published in 2002 and another, NO PERFECT WORDS, is forthcoming in Fall 2009. She is also editor of WRECKAGE OF REASON: ANTHOLOGY OF XXPERIMENTAL PROSE BY CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS (Spuyten Duyvil 2008).
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5.0 out of 5 stars
An intriguing and fascinating story many women will relate to,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: No Perfect Words (Perfect Paperback)
Time has a nasty tendency to leave the whys of the matter unanswered. "No Perfect Words" is a novel looking at the life of Caroline Traeger, struck with a midlife crisis and a seven year old daughter. Unsure of how she got to that point in the first place, she reflects on her life and what she truly believes in and wants out of life. An intriguing and fascinating story many women will relate to, "No Perfect Words" is not to be missed.
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