Customer Reviews

Sunset Terrace: A Novel

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City streets are the playgrounds of the children who live at Sunset Terrace, and patches of dead grass, trash-strewn lots and cracked concrete bordered by battered chain link fencing. Summer days are spent stealing cigarettes and candy from the neighborhood market. These are the beneficiaries of the trickle-down policies of the '80's, living in a vast economic wasteland, families kept together by women who work at minimum wage jobs and buy groceries with food stamps.

Elaine arrives at Sunset Terrace with her two daughters, a year after their father has committed suicide. An itinerant chef, Elaine moved her girls from job to job, motel to motel, all across the country. Hannah, nine, lonely and confused by her father's death, was responsible for younger sister, Daisy, while their mother worked late shifts at various roadside restaurants. Rent-controlled Sunset Terrace, in So. California, is a step up for the small family, a new start.

Hannah wants friends, but doesn't know the rules, ever on the wrong side of belonging. Bridget, an iconoclastic nine-year-old foster-child who lives downstairs, captures Hannah's attention. Bridget is street savvy, already a victim of ... abuse, the kind of child easily dropped through bureaucratic cracks, shuffled from one place to another. While Bridget carefully courts Hannah, Elaine finds herself feeling sorry for the girl, often including Bridget in family gatherings, while unaware of the girl's dark side. Bridget's smart mouth and intimidating behavior draws Hannah like a moth to flame, the vague promise of a walk on the wild side. Hannah is unprepared for the escalating violence of their games, as Bridget is more and more mean-spirited. Eventually, Hannah grows distant, less trusting, disturbed by Bridget's demeanor.

A woman in the complex talks Elaine into attending a Parents-Without-Partners function, where Elaine meets an eligible man, Sam. For Elaine, the genial and loving Sam is unexpected, like winning the Cinderella lottery, a way out. Without him, they are trapped in an indifferent world, surrounded on all sides by poverty and social decay, their sojourn at Sunset Terrace only a respite on a downhill slide. During their last few days, Hannah and Bridget clash frequently, especially when Hannah defends her younger sister from Bridget's unnecessary meanness. Although furious, Hannah agrees to a final game, one that has unexpected and life-changing consequences for both girls.

The families of Sunset Terrace live a marginal existence, prey to unstable financial circumstances. Affordable child-care for working mothers is as realistic as the Emerald City at the end of the Yellow Brick Road. Sunset Terrace is a scathing social commentary on the disastrous effects of poverty and a system that ignores the most vulnerable in our society, sweeping them aside like so much detritus. We are not in Kansas, Dorothy. Meet the fringe-dwellers, one step away from homelessness, dancing as fast as they can. Luan Gaines/2003.

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Once I read past page one I couldn't put this book down. Heartbreaking, beautifully crafted and utterly original.

I grew up on Sawtelle in LA and was reminded of things I had forgotten while reading this book. Very evocative.

Donner does a remarkable job of putting you inside the heads of her characters, especially the 10 year old Hannah. Her ability to make Hannah's (to an adult's mind) illogical thoughts seem perfectly reasonable rises to the level of Lynda Berry, whose little-girl characters also occupy a bleak and forbidding urban landscape.

A touching and wonderful book. Donner is a marvelous storyteller.

I was absolutely blown away by this book. A good
friend recommended I read it and I must say, I was
skeptical (I'm so tired of the "women's novels"
crowding the bookstores). But Sunset Terrace is so
different than those sappy, predictable books. The
prose is both tough and lyrical, and the characters in
the apartment building are so convincingly described I
felt as if I knew them. I was so moved by the ending
-- the author doesn't overwrite, and she doesn't
provide easy answers. A true work of art.

Donner has a great sense of character and place, and paints her low-rent, Pico-Boulevard setting in tough unsentimental prose.

Nine-year-old Hannah, her little sister Daisy and their mother Elaine have just joined the other single mothers and their children at Sunset Terrace, a small apartment complex in a poor part of Los Angeles. It's the first time in the three years since her father's death that Hannah and her sister have had a real home, a bedroom that wasn't a motel in one of the cities their mom passed through as she took a temporary cook's job in some restaurant or diner to tide them over.

Shortly after arriving, Hannah meets Bridget, a nine-year-old foster child who lives downstairs. A foul-mouthed daredevil, Bridget is the natural leader of the Sunset Terrace girls, even those older than herself. Hannah alternates between awe and fear of Bridget's sheer dominance -- as well as an unmistakable jealousy when Elaine, feeling sorry for the little girl with a long history of abuse and neglect, begins to treat her almost as another of her own daughters.

Soon, it's too much for Hannah to bear. Bridget may be fun at times, sure, but life was certainly better before she and Daisy had to share their mother with her. Thus Hannah concocts a plan to get even with her -- a plan that goes horribly wrong.

Donner is adept at depicting three-dimensional characters which are both just ordinary people, yet unique and memorable.

While Elaine may have life & liberty, she has rarely known happiness. Into SUNSET TERRACE she moves with her two daughters after three years on the road. 12 year old Hannah, her sister & turtle settle in for a long hot summer. Here they get to know the other families & Hannah is taken under the wing of the fiercesome Bridget, a foster child with a past & a not-so-nurturing present. She also has a daring & dangerous sense of adventure & courage.

SUNSET TERRACE could have been unrelentingly depressing, after all what's romantic about welfare moms & their damaged children? Except Rebecca Donner has infused her debut novel with an intense look into children's live as well as realistic hope in the way Elaine searches for a better life.

Rebeccasreads recommends SUNSET TERRACE as a devastating & hopeful glimpse of the pursuit of happiness.

Forget 'The Lovely Bones.' If you want beautiful prose and a gripping narrative, Sunset Terrace is it. It's a gritty, heartbreaking, realistic portrayal of loss and redemption, told alternately from a mother's and daughter's perspectives. The author doesn't candy-coat anything. The book is almost like poetry.