From Publishers Weekly
As Stolzman's character-driven debut opens, eight-year-old Anna Levy and her mother witness a horrific scene: the small boat that her five-year-old sister, Megan, is on with their father capsizes close to shore, and Megan drowns. In the immediate aftermath, Anna blames herself for not plunging into the water and joining the frantic search. She begins an imaginary, one-sided conversation in sign language with Megan that leads the grown-up Anna to adopt a deaf five-year-old (whom she mistakenly renames "Adrea" by incorrectly signing "Andrea") and to a career working with deaf children. As Anna and Adrea grow into their lives together, watchful Anna is forced to confront ghosts from her past and to learn to stop living life as a spectator. Stolzman gives Anna a poetic soul ("words of sympathy had exhausted my tolerance for words themselves"), and a carefully constructed redemption that unfolds with vivid observational detail.
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Review
“By offering her heroine’s hesitant optimism through such disarmingly honest confessions, Stolzman exhibits an authentic emotional and narrative integrity, an impressive feat for a debut novelist. Stolzman brings this lyrical sensibility to an elegiac tale of a family’s heart-stopping tragedy and hard-won redemption, in which a tarnished silence can once again be made to shine through the resonate power of love.”—
Foreword Magazine “At a time when cool, ironic fiction is too much the rage, here is a novel written straight from the heart, a tender yet fearless portrait of a loving family crippled by grief. Rachel Stolzman reminds us what kind of stories matter, and move us, the most.”—Julia Glass, author of
Three Junes and
The Whole World Over “Reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s
The Child in Time and Frederick Reichen’s
The Odd Sea, this is a moving and important novel. Rachel Stolzman's story about a woman’s attempts to find order in the broken world she inhabits deftly captures grief and the struggle to live within its lifelong specter.”—Bret Lott, author of
Jewel and
A Song I Knew by Heart “Against the themes of loss and mourning in this radiant novel are balanced those of nurturing and hope.”—Roy Hoffman, author of
Chicken Dreaming Corn and
Almost Family “Rendered in spare and original prose,
The Sign for Drowning is a piercing and poignant tale of loss and love. Rachel Stolzman writes from the heart and speaks to the heart. This haunting first novel is the story of unspeakable horror and extraordinary beauty.”—Patty Dann, author of
The Goldfish Went on Vacation
"It's a delicately balanced novel, spare but not taciturn, emotional but not overwrought, and finally hopeful but not unnaturally cheerful."—Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch
