Description
Book SynopsisFamily pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves-Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a deft, comic, and devastatingly precise hand.
Trade ReviewMcGarry's stories are psychological studies constructed around a moment of reckoning-a first date at the church social, a wedding day tomorrow, the last reveries of a dying man. She burrows deeply into the sensibilities of recognizable, ordinary people-our younger selves, sisters and brothers we could know, parents and adult children we have been or have observed. Providence Journal 2010 Exceptionally intense, intricately structured, and as arresting and consistently engaging as fractal art... the stories trace characters' sense of a double existence: the life inside family, defined and constrained by McGarry's meticulous details, and the boundless life of the spirit. Her literary progenitors range from Willa Cather to Virginia Woolf--but she brings a savage lyricism to her stories, a sense of rage contained perilously by wit and intelligence, that gives the stories a menacing aspect, like watching a man threatening suicide walk on a ledge. The Hopkins Review 2011
Table of ContentsPart I: Family Happiness
Chapter 1. Family Happiness
Chapter 2. The Sweetness of Her Name
Chapter 3. The Tree of Life
Part II: Transference
Chapter 4. Transference
Chapter 5. Gold Leaf
Chapter 6. A Full House
Part III: The Wedding Gowns
Chapter 7. The Wedding Gowns
Chapter 8. Family Romance
Chapter 9. The Offering
Part IV: Ocean State
Chapter 10. Dream Date
Chapter 11. Welcome Wherever He Went
Chapter 12. The Night Before
Chapter 13. Ocean State
Acknowledgements
