Amazon.com Review
Fiona Range often feels cursed. At 30 she is an odd--or perhaps not so odd--combination of sentimentality, irritability, and promiscuity. Mary McGarry Morris's heroine lives on the outskirts of Boston and works at a diner. She grew up in the household of her uncle, a prominent judge. But although she was raised in privilege, she was always treated as the charity case--the abandoned child of a beautiful crazy woman who "drove off weeping one rainy afternoon, never to return."
Fiona dwells on this original abandonment. She thinks about it when she wakes up with strange men, when she gets too drunk and sad, when all the people in town start to resemble sharks, preying on her. She keeps getting involved with bad men, and as the novel opens, she has been kicked out of her uncle's house after her boyfriend's arrest for selling drugs. Fiona Range is the story of her attempts to clean her life up, find love in the midst of loneliness and confusion, and find balance in the midst of seemingly insurmountable emotional chaos.
Morris (author of Songs in Ordinary Time) skillfully paints Fiona as a woman toughened by loneliness. Often she feels that she is beyond pain as a result of all she has endured: "Fiona Range's teeth had been filled without novocaine, her wounds stitched without anesthesia, her heart broken too many times to count. Once as a child she fell from a tree and broke her arm but didn't tell her aunt until hours later when her favorite show had ended." Yet while she is often invulnerable, she is also fragile and needy. In Morris's skillful hands Fiona comes vibrantly to life--a crabby, lusty woman who hopes the fates will give her a break. --Ellen Williams
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Small towns are never as ordinary as they seem; everyone has secrets. In her well-received novels (A Dangerous Woman, etc.), Morris has honed this territory with empathy for those on the fringes of community life. Here she raises the stakes: it's the best families in town that have the most to lose, and thus to hide. Fiona Range is the black sheep of the Hollis clan, residents of Dearborn, Mass. When her unwed mother abandoned her as a baby, Fiona was raised by her aunt and uncle. Headstrong and reckless, she has always felt like an outsider. At 30, she has never attended college, held a good job or had a relationship with a good man. She's now waiting tables, drinking, satisfying her need for intimacy by sleeping around, and despairing about her future. Then her cousin Elizabeth returns from New York with a physician fianc?, an event that devastates Elizabeth's hometown boyfriend. Fiona becomes sexually involved with both men, a fact not lost on anyone. Meanwhile, she's determined to achieve a relationship with badly scarred Vietnam vet Patrick Grady, who everyone says is her father, though he vehemently denies paternity. The reader catches on far earlier than Fiona that her uncle's warnings about Patrick's violence hide a secret of his own, and that his vaunted charity to Patrick and others is hush money. The plot seems to go in circles as Fiona ignores common sense and repeatedly behaves rashly, afterward suffering guilt and self-disgust. In fact, Fiona's headlong self-destruction distance her from the reader's sympathy. Yet there is sustained tension in the narrative, and the denouement packs a thriller's excitement. Agent, Jean Naggar. BOMC selection. (May) FYI: Morris's Songs in Ordinary Time was an Oprah Book Club selection.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
by Mary McGarry Morris
by Mary McGarry Morris
by Mary McGarry Morris
by Mary Morris
by Mary Morris
