The Skating Pond [Hardcover]

Deborah Joy Corey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 2003

Deborah Joy Corey's long-awaited second novel fulfills the promise of her first. It is the story of Elizabeth, a fifteen-year-old girl from a poor fishing town, who finds herself alone after her sister's banishment, her mother's tragic death, and her father's abandonment-and turns for comfort to an older man who will cast an emotional and erotic shadow over her life, even years after their relationship is over...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The titular skating pond of Deborah Joy Corey's long-awaited second novel is the site of a terrible accident that reveals the cracks in 14-year-old Elizabeth's troubled family life. The daughter of an aloof painter and a frustrated Canadian beauty with an untapped gift for figure skating, Elizabeth spends winter afternoons watching her mother practice spins near their home in an isolated New England fishing village. When a stray hockey puck hits her mother in the forehead, Elizabeth once again finds herself on the sidelines. This time, however, she becomes a silent witness to the inexorable process by which a disfiguring facial injury not only destroys her parents' marriage but also robs her mother of sanity and life itself.

Elizabeth survives the loss of her family only to enter a passionate and increasingly hostile relationship with an older man who is not unlike her self-absorbed artist father. Her inability to free herself from Frederick's icy grip forms the central drama of this Gothic tale and ultimately leads her to make error in judgment with reverberations almost as disastrous as the accident on the pond. Elizabeth's moving account of her parents' break-up is reminiscent of Corey's first novel, Losing Eddie, in which a nameless nine-year-old records, with chilling dispassion, the collapse of her own family. In the latter half of The Skating Pond, however, Elizabeth's voice suffers from a surfeit of romanticizing imagery, obscuring her motivations and those of other characters in a haze of purple prose. Corey remains a dazzling stylist but this novel lacks the precision that made Losing Eddie such an emotional tour de force. --Lisa Alward, Amazon.ca

From Publishers Weekly

"Maybe a crisis is what frees people. Maybe we spend our entire lives avoiding what we should embrace." Elizabeth Johnson, the narrator of Corey's sensuous but overwrought second novel (after Losing Eddie), experiences two such crises, the first when the girl's beautiful mother, Doreen, a professional-level figure skater, is hit in the face by a puck while skating at a local pond in the tiny coastal Maine town of Stonington. The injury seems innocuous, but Doreen begins having seizures and dies from complications. Shortly after her funeral, the girl's father, a former lobsterman turned painter, abruptly leaves 15-year-old Elizabeth in order to pursue his artistic career. Somewhat improbably left to live alone, Elizabeth falls into the arms of an older lover, a worldly, married New York architect named Frederick who is smitten by the girl. Their mad affair ends grotesquely, and Elizabeth, pregnant, is rescued by gentle but haunted Michael McDonald, the boy who injured Doreen. They marry and go on to have two children, making a happy but precarious life for themselves, which is disrupted when Frederick comes back to town. Corey's voluptuous descriptions of physical sensations carry the reader pleasantly along, but the characters' solemn pronouncements (" `She was not without guilt, you know. No woman ever is' ") grow tiresome, and it becomes difficult to overlook the improbabilities of the plot. Juicy and sloppy as an overripe plum, the novel cloys long before its end is reached.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Berkley Hardcover; First Edition edition (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425188353
• ISBN-13: 978-0425188354
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,311,542 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking prose and rich imagery!, January 9, 2003

By 

Ark Lady (Diana L Guerrero) "ArkLady" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Skating Pond (Hardcover)

Copyright © 2003 by Diana Guerrero
The Skating Pond is full of breathtaking prose. The rich imagery and descriptions were a delight. Once hooked, I didn't put up much of a fight and followed Elizabeth's journey from adolescence through motherhood surviving challenges and memories. I devoured this novel and will definitely put Ms. Corey on my list of authors to watch.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GENTLE METAPHORS  STRONG CHARACTERS AND STORY, July 8, 2003

By 

Larry L. Looney (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Skating Pond (Hardcover)

The metaphors in this novel are truly uncountable - but every one is aptly drawn. Combine that with a cast of characters that are so compelling and real, involved in a story with which any reader should be able to relate, and there are plenty of reasons why this novel should be widely read and lauded. The quote on the book from Elizabeth Hardwick, characterizing THE SKATING POND as `a love story' might lead some potential readers to write it off as romantic fluff - to do so would be to do this novel a great injustice. This is simply incredible writing.

Corey's main character, Elizabeth, is thrust into adulthood at an early age through a double tragedy - the death of her mother and subsequent abandonment by her father. Over the course of twelve years, we see Elizabeth go through the emotional ups and downs that would easily fill most people's lifetimes. Through it all - through her yearnings for more than a life in a remote Maine coastal village can offer her - she remains questioning. She questions the life led by those around her, and she questions herself - what does she really want out of life; what can she expect from it; what does she know of love, and what does she want from it? These are things that each of us must work out for ourselves, in our own way - and Corey's lovely writing allows us inside Elizabeth's mind and heart as she walks (and sometimes stumbles, as do we all) through life.

Corey has a way of revealing the humanity and goodness that resides (I believe) in all people - even the characters in her story that are somewhat less than likable come across sympathetically, at least in some ways. The life-lessons that her central character absorbs here are never presented as set-in-stone or rigid - as another reviewed astutely pointed out, it's all about the choices we make. Those are the ones we have to live with.

I wonder if Corey set out to write such an ambitious novel, or if it `just happened' to turn out that way. Whatever her original intentions, she has written an absorbing, rewarding and entertaining novel - highly recommended.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Choices, Choices - it's really up to you !!, January 6, 2003

By 

"book group junkie" (Suburban, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Skating Pond (Hardcover)

THE SKATING POND by Deborah Joy Corey is a story written to the emotions and soul of the reader. It works its way into your mind, and haunts you with its meanings and consequences. By writing this story in first person, Ms Corey allows the reader to fully experience the happenings and people in the life of the main character, Elizabeth. These things are felt and viewed by Elizabeth in the presentation of the story, but the judgments about these things are left up to the reader. After looking for love in all the 'right' places, Elizabeth finds only pain, disquiet, and abandonment - she then turns to a place where she receives great passion and greater pain. Eventually, Elizabeth makes choices, grapples with her emptiness and past, and finds a love that gives her the option of a life of sweetness and joy----if she has not waited too late for this to become her life long reality.

Skating, and memories of her mother, take Elizabeth on a journey of great intensity for the reader. Deborah Joy Corey writes with such a fluidity of function and style that even the most mundane story line could become a masterpiece. Though in reality, it's the greatness of what Ms Corey has chosen to write about that completes the superiority of this book. Somewhere in the middle of this book, one of the characters makes a profound statement concerning tragedy and choices: saying that the person has a CHOICE to make when tragedy happens--be destroyed, or be glued together. So many books of dysfunction and disillusionment seem to leave each person to some unknown "fate". Ms. Corey gives the reader an opportunity to experience personal responsibility and choices within a fictional world in this beautifully written story that can be enjoyed again and again.