Monkey Bay - Hardcover

Ford, Elaine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670827525 ISBN 13: 9780670827527

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1989

Synopsis

Abandoning a loveless marriage to be with the man she truly loved twelve years before, Marilla Pratt also leaves behind a daughter who years later exacts her revenge

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Set in a coastal Maine town, Ford's ( Ivory Bright ) engaging, bittersweet novel keeps the reader vacillating between hope and dread. The story takes place during the relentless off-season, from rain through snow to mud. Some 12 years ago, Marilla Pratt left her husband, Lyle (whose one talent is to make people pity him), to run off with Tucker Burchard, a rogue. The Pratts' adolescent daughter, Hannah, was a casualty of the split; molested by her father after her mother's departure, she finally fled, too. Now, with Lyle married to Frances, a smug ex-teacher, and Marilla living with Tucker in the house he whacked together out of salvaged bits and pieces, the emotionally maimed Hannah, now a woman, comes back to town. These characters squander their time in laundromats, trailers, partitioned offices and Pepsi Redemption Centers, their lives mapped by circumstances. In this carefully observed, hostile world--where bullets are held in a hand like "the scat of some animal" and a boy urinating "cut a lot of holes in the snow, like bullet holes"--literal and emotional killing is continuous. Captured in spare, ringingly authentic dialogue and leavened with ironic humor, Ford's close-up on quietly desperate lives, like Walker Evans's famous photos, is beautiful and disturbing.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This bleak novel set on the coast of Maine is a story of love and betrayal. Marilla had left her boring husband and 12-year-old daughter to move in with her lover, Tucker. Now the daughter, Helen, in her 20s and adrift, has moved back to Monkey Bay temporarily. She lives first with her father and then with Marilla and Tucker, causing profound changes in the lives of all three. The novel is told in a clear, sparse prose that paints a dour picture of these unsatisfying lives. Because we don't really get inside anyone's head, the story remains remote and uncompelling. It may change forever readers' romantic notions about life in Maine.
- Janet Boyarin Blundell, Brookdale Community Coll . , Lincroft, N . J.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0670827525
• ISBN 13: 9780670827527
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256