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Booklist, starred review
“To choose beauty, to insist on it, this was a large gesture. Julia, an artist and divorced mother of two grown sons, inspires this perception in one of many transforming moments in this piercing novel of loss, in which choosing beauty (manifest in Robinson’s gorgeous prose) is crucial to survival. The author of Sweetwater (2003) and several short story collections, Robinson subtly conflates nature and human concerns as a crisis brings estranged family members together at Julia’s weathered home on the coast of Maine. Jack’ her younger son, has become addicted to heroin. His straight-arrow brother blames himself. Julia is in shock. Her neurosurgeon father, the source of much of the family’s angst, is secretly tormented by his exacting knowledge of what happens to the brain under the influence of opiates, and Alzheimer’s, which has begun its cruel assault on his lovely, stoic wife.
Robinson has always been a sensitive and revelatory writer, but she attains new degrees of intensity here in her scorching depictions of the nightmare world of addiction. Her illuminations of the churning inner lives of her smart and deep feeling characters depict good people facing brutal forces beyond the reach of reason or love.” – Donna Seaman
Jun 2008. 420 p. Farrar/Sarah Crichton, hardcover, $25.00. (9780374271879).