Against Gravity: A Novel - Hardcover

Ferriss, Lucy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684800918 ISBN 13: 9780684800912

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1996

Synopsis

Longing to escape her dreary Hudson River home, Gwyn Stickley finds the fabric of her life changing when her best friend becomes pregnant and a local storekeeper is accused of child molestation. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Lucy Ferriss heads the creative writing program at Hamilton College.

From Kirkus Reviews

A convoluted coming-of-age story with a gothic veneer. Gwyn Stickley, known as ``Stick,'' witnesses the explosion of the Challenger when she's on a high-school trip to Florida. Returning to her dreary unnamed hamlet in upstate New York, she might want to brood about the tragedy, but she's got plenty to brood about already in her own backyard: There's best friend JoAnn, for instance, secretly pregnant and still swilling beer; local storekeeper Gray, who, with his retarded son Benjy, has recently been charged with child-molesting; and Stick's own bickering parents, especially her beautiful, elusive mother Wanda, who seems to be harboring dark secrets of her own. When JoAnn's son is born in a shed in the woods, Stick assists at the birth, then spirits the baby to a mall where someone can find him and take him in. She can't stop thinking about the infant, but she takes up religion and tap-dancing, at least for a while, and her story gathers some pull when she heads for Manhattan to try for a career. All too soon, though, she's tapped out. She heads back upstate to confront a new onslaught of tragedies--including JoAnn's violent death, the discovery of a skeleton in the woods, and a gruesome accident that leaves her own father impaled on a spike fence. It's all a bit too much: Ferriss could have whittled her plot twists to half of what's here and made a better, more coherent story. By the time Mom finally reveals her dark secret, we're too numb to care a lot; and for someone with so much savvy, Stick never understands that she really does need to dance her way to freedom, finishing instead where she began, back in the hamlet. Stick is stuck. Overdone and overtold. Ferriss (The Gated River, 1986, etc.) should have listened to her own main character, a girl whose favorite pastime is parsing sentences to reveal their basic elements. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684800918
• ISBN 13: 9780684800912
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304