Salt Dancers: A Novel [Hardcover]

Ursula Hegi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1995

Unmarried and pregnant at 41, Julia returns to Spokane, Washington, to the father she hasn't seen in 23 years. She is determined to understand, before her child is born, what made her mother disappear one day, and how her father became a punitive alcoholic who could never be pleased.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ursula Hegi follows her masterful and critically acclaimed novel Stones from the River with a dramatic contemporary tale of one woman's journey back to her childhood through layers of memory, fear, longing, and love. Unmarried and pregnant at forty-one, Julia returns home to a father she hasn't seen in twenty-three years, and to the memories of secrecy, betrayal, abuse and abandonment that haunt her still. Haunting and lyrical, beautiful and harrowing, Salt Dancers fulfills the promise of Hegi's earlier work.

From Publishers Weekly

Readers of Floating in My Mother's Palm and Stones from the River, Hegi's impressive sagas of life in a fictional German village, are acquainted with her storytelling skill, her sinewy yet lyrical prose and her strong moral imagination. In comparison with those page-hefty books, this is a slim volume, but it lacks none of the psychological insights and emotional impact of the earlier novels. For almost a decade of Julia Ives's life in Spokane, Wash., her father was a protective, nurturing presence. He taught her the salt dance, a ritual to help her leave everything she feared behind a line of salt, and he gave her the "trouble people," dolls that can solve your troubles while you sleep. Ironically, these have become metaphors for the emotional safety Julia lost one day when she was nine and her brother Travis a year younger, when her mother left them all without a word and vanished from their lives. Stunned and aching with loneliness, Julia then had to endure her father's frequent drunken assaults; he beat her, demanding that she declare her love for him. College was Julia's passport out of Spokane. Now, 24 years later, pregnant but unmarried at 41, she comes from her home in Vermont to confront her father with her memories, to see her brother, who also bears emotional scars from their childhood, and to try to fathom the mystery of her mother's disappearance. Hegi uses Julia's quest to explore the selective power of memory and the ambiguities that cloud family relationships. She evokes the varied landscape of Washington and the emotional landscape of Julia's memories with equal facility, though she sometimes overindulges in Julia's fantasies of finding her mother. Yet, there is both poignancy and suspense in Julia's journey through her past, and the surprises she encounters in herself as well as others lead to a healing resolution that has the open-ended feel of real life.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (August 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684802090
• ISBN-13: 978-0684802091
• Product Dimensions: 13.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,796,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sparkling, small gem, not a huge Stone from the River!, August 7, 1997

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Salt Dancers (Paperback)

The Kirkus Review notwithstanding, this is a much more accessible, though not patronizing, account of a young woman's coming to terms with her family background. True, it is not "panoramic," as was Stones from the River. It is, in fact, the opposite, a story of just one real, fully drawn American adult woman who is pregnant, not the story, however wonderful Stones is, of a symbol whose life is different in every respect from that which most of us face daily. Though The Salt Dancers deals with common enough themes--alienation, the search for love, the desire to reconcile with the past--so do many other novels. What makes The Salt Dancers worth reading--indeed, what makes most good novels worth reading--is the fresh approach the author makes to these themes. Hegi's presentation of the distortions of memory alone make the book worth reading. Those who are expecting a sweeping novel in the tradition of Stones from the River may be disappointed. This reader, however, found The Salt Dancers more personally involving

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good beach reading, February 26, 2000

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Salt Dancers (Paperback)

This novel that makes good beach reaching. The pace was slow, the mood dreamy and the characters interesting.

The theme is contemporary -- a 41-year old successful female architect, unmarried and pregnant by choice, visits her home town of Spokane Washington to come to terms with her past. Her childhood has been broken by her mother's desertion when she was 9 years old, and her memories of her childhood with her father and brother haunt her. Little by little, the reader is drawn into the story of her family and the final resolution brings completion to her questions about the past.

The story is small but the writing is good, and I was drawn into the character's thought processes and memories. It was a pleasant, if not challenging, read, and a good example of mood and setting. Recommended if you're looking for a well-told exploration of this woman's story.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Searching for the Other Half, April 21, 2001

By 

Kay Mitchell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Salt Dancers (Paperback)

The search for one's mother never stops, even when your mother is always with you,(for who can ever really know their mother) but when she just one day disappears, the heartbreak and longing that follow are incomparable. When Julia was only nine years old, her mother just vanished, never to return. She and her brother, Travis, were left with a father who loved them, but also drank too much and occasionally, took out his despair on Julia in the form of beatings and rage. Although she left as soon as life would permit, she was forever filled with the hate left from those years and the abuse she sustained from her father and her brother's lack of help. When she returns at age 41, pregnant, her thoughts are full of what kind of mother she will be as she encounters her father, now old and slow, for the first time in twenty years. Memories come and go, but slowly she realizes that some of those memories are good. The universal fact that all people are selective in their memories is reflected in Julia's realization that her childhood was not all bad, and that her father's selective memory had blocked out all those times of anger and rage against her until he had simply lost them. This is a novel of redemption, not only for Julia but for her brother as well. That her father is somewhat redeemed in her mind and the realization that she does love him are in fact, the anchoring point of the novel. The reclamation of their mother is a secondary and restoring event that brings the lives of brother and sister--and mother--to welcome fruition and peace. Julia finds as she leaves her mother, that she can be a good mother herself as she treasures the hope that her own mother will be part of her future life. Ultimately a life affirming book, Salt Dancers examines family and personal issues that haunt many people and it forces the reader to reevaluate their own memories.