Waltzing Through Flaws - Hardcover

Sharp, Paula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747552908 ISBN 13: 9780747552901

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2001

Synopsis

Penny knows that her mother drinks too much and has a flair for melodrama but she also has a sense of fun that makes everything feel the way it should. So when her mother goes south in 1977 to dry out in a convent, Penny is alarmed to be left in the care of a high-minded lady called Isabel Flood.

About this title

About the Author

Paula Sharp is the author of the critically acclaimed bestseller CROWS OVER A WHEATFIELD, and three previous novels, THE WOMAN WHO WAS NOT ALL THERE, THE IMPOSTER and LOST IN JERSEY CITY. A graduate of Columbia Law School, she lives in New York State.

Review

Placed during the summer of 1977 in Stein, a bleak prison town in upstate New York, this is a tale of growing up, teenage angst and the fine line drawn between evangelism and fanaticism. Widowed Marguerite Daigle is the mother of 15-year-old Mahalia and eight-year-old Penny, the former experiencing the rebelliousness of adolescence and the latter suffering wilfulness and additive-induced hyperactivity. Told retrospectively by a now adult Penny, but still through the eyes of an eight-year-old, it is the story of the summer the girls mother found she could no longer cope and sought solace in alcohol. Rescued by brother F.X. and her lover David, she is sent to dry out in a Louisiana convent leaving the girls in the hands of Isabel Flood, a local pamphleteering Evangelist. Penny observes her sister discovering religion as an escape from the embarrassing behaviour of their mother and her slow brainwashing as she is ensnared by Flood's ideologies. Aided by an 8 year olds ability to be overlooked, she watches and hears her sister's conversion at the local Evangelists Women's Meetings, and sees with a perception beyond her years the parental defiance that has triggered it. The key catalyst to all this is Isabel Flood, a fringe adherent to Stein Evangelical who spends her days missioning for pro-life. Her introduction into the Daigle household in Marguerite's absence causes Penny great distress at her new lack of freedom and elation in Mahalia who sees it as a triumph over her free-living mother that her idol has usurped her position. However, slowly but surely, Isabel's fanaticism becomes more obvious to Mahalia who eventually finds that she is as embarrassed by their association as she was with her mother's apposite lifestyle. The characters are warmly drawn and all have their own idiosyncracies to add to the story, most particularly Penny with the inherent naughtiness of an 8 year old child. Beautifully written, it is not a book to be hurried, more a leisurely journey through two children's lives during the scorching summer months of the late '70s. - Lucy Watson

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0747552908
• ISBN 13: 9780747552901
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 384