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Synopsis
Five generations of Marchewka women struggle to cope with the hardships of emigration and assimilation in twentieth-century America as they battle to preserve family traditions and deal with the realities of modern life
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Review
Leslie Pietrzyk's Pears on a Willow Tree starts with a recipe for pierogi and ends with one for poppy-seed cake. In between, four generations of Polish-American women talk, cook, argue, sew each other's wedding dresses, tell stories, and understand and misunderstand each other in the way that only mothers and daughters can. Starting with iron-willed Rose, who emigrates from Poland, and ending with Amy, who flees the role of her alcoholic mother's keeper, the Marchewka women enact an ancient dance of embracing and rejecting the tradition they come from. "It is the girls who keep the family alive," Rose writes to her Polish mother; but it is also true that, as she later tells her great-granddaughter, "It's impossible for a good daughter to leave; it's impossible for a good daughter to stay." Many of the chapters in Pears on a Willow Tree were first published as stories, and they sometimes hang together a trifle too neatly, with none of a novel's usual depth or range. But Pietrzyk has a nifty, uncluttered prose style and above all a keen ear for the way women really do talk. Pears on a Willow Tree is a promising debut from a writer with a gift for the enduring art of domestic portraiture.
About the Author
LESLIE PIETRZYK's fiction has been published in numerous literary journals, including Triquarterly, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and New England Review. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and is Director of Communications at an area Chamber of Commerce. She has been awarded blue ribbons at the Virginia State Fair for her banana bread and chocolate chip cookies. PEARS ON A WILLOW TREE is her first novel.
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- PublisherBard
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 0380976676
- ISBN 13 9780380976676
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages272
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Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Included. Book and dust jacket in very good condition, Inscribed on the title page by the author. Content: A multigenerational roadmap of love and hate, distance and closeness, and the lure of roots that both bind and sustain us all, also about polish american women. ; Signed by Author. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. Signed by Author(s). Seller Inventory # 4251
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