St. Ursula's Girls Against the Atomic Bomb - Softcover

Hurley, Valerie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452285690 ISBN 13: 9780452285699

Publisher: Plume, 2004

Synopsis

After being enrolled in St. Ursula's School for Girls by her parents, a frustrated and rebellious Raine Rassaby takes up a crusade against atomic weapons and begins a relationship with her guidance counselor, Al Klepatar. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

Valerie Hurley won the Indiana Review Fiction prize, and has published stories in The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, and New Letters, among others. Two of her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays anthologies.

From Booklist

Raine, a wildly eccentric 18-year-old, is making her second try for senior year at St. Ursula's school on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Her guidance counselor is Al, who lives next door to Raine's wealthy, intellectual family and has seen Raine playing the bagpipes in her garden or befriending homeless people. Obsessed with "humanity's cruel streak," Raine prefers to organize antinuclear protests and to keep scrapbooks on the Holocaust rather than study, upsetting her high-achieving parents. But her idealistic, "crazy, jangling" conversation is filled with truths that soothe Al, whose marriage is disintegrating, and he finds himself unwillingly pulled toward his student. Mixing sharp dialogue, lyrical narration, and Raine's yearning, intelligent diary entries, first-novelist Hurley explores her characters' complicated, intersecting lives with an affection that's contagious, even as she asks deeper questions about how to live bravely and survive betrayals, both global and personal. Readers won't easily forget Raine, who, despite her apocalyptic fears and flights of fancy, recognizes the world's "astonishing things." Gillian Engberg
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Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0452285690
• ISBN 13: 9780452285699
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272