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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
First published in England, this collection of short stories and a novella contains several stories that are written from the viewpoint of foreign, working-class women, who suffer at the hands of society and those in positions of power. In "He Said," Beva young black Londoner with subsistence employmentlearns that she is pregnant. The doctor recommends an abortion, and her slick boyfriend abandons her; but she meets a compassionate woman in her building who gets her to recognize that the men do not have her best interests in mind. In the eponymous novella, Hannah, a talented glass-blower, slowly recovers from the death of her lover, Jenny, a world-famous, feminist poet. While the characters and the situation are of some interest, Burford's earnestness causes the story to drag, the writing is often sloppy (in several sentences, for example, the word "sudden" is used twice), and she has a kind of mystical approach to the process of creativity that isn't clearly conveyed ("Filling with light as she turned the glass bowl slowly in the silence, the joyous dance of the swifts through the liquid blue morning, a symphony in light and colour").
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Brown-skinned, brown-eyed, black-haired women are at the center of each of the seven short stories in this collective. "Dreaming the Sky Down" features Donna, a teenager who practices flying only in her dreams until she learns to fly in the face of abusive school nuns. In "The Pinstripe Summer," a loyal and bored bookkeeper falls in love "with such tensile insidiousness, that although she had not been consciously aware of its spangled ambush, she was able, once knowing, to plot the ways and steps of its arrival." The title story, an intense novella about love and art, is told through Hannah, a young working-class glass artist recovering from the breast-cancer death of her partner, Jennifer Harrison. Despite the fact that Jennifer is a white, middle-class poet, she and Hannah had done the hard work necessary to make a good life together. Grieving alone in the home Jennifer's family abandoned, the home she and Jennifer remodeled to make their own, Hannah must make her way past memories of Jennifer and through her own nearly forgotten shame to find new life and love. Deeply evocative, the prose in these stories vibrates with the wisdom of experienced passion. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
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