Items related to Change Baby
Synopsis
Avie Goss is a 'change baby', born to her mother late in life, almost a generation after her two siblings. When her mother nearly dies in a house fire, Avie returns to the home she abandoned after college to look after her. But her motives are not completely altruistic; Avie also needs a break from her complicated and disastrous love-life. At the age of twenty-four, she finds it difficult at first to adjust from being the spoiled baby of the family to principal caretaker, but soon rises to the challenge. Avie decides to stay longer than planned and surprises herself by finding her rural home town is not without its charms; none more so than the enigmatic newcomer, Saul. Through a tangled web of relationships - with her family, her mother's oldest friend, and Avie's married ex-lover - she comes upon a new understanding of herself and her place within her ancestral legacy. As she better learns who she is as a daughter, friend, and lover, she must decide what kind of person she wants to be, and how she will embark on her future.
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About the Author
June Spence's stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Southern Review, Seventeen, and The Oxford American. A winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize, she lives with her husband, the writer Scott Huler.
From Publishers Weekly
In this impressive first novel, a young woman discovers skeletons long hidden in the family closet. Avie Goss was born 24 years ago, just before her mother's menopause and long after her two "more suitably timed siblings." She trusted that once she left her hometown of Regina, N.C., "the future would cough up its gems," but she's now a recovering alcoholic in a dysfunctional relationship with a married man. When her 73-year-old mother, Mabry, is injured in a house fire, Avie returns home to care for her. She seeks out Mabry's cousin and oldest friend, Zephra, curious about the rift between them, and is told that the two women aren't really kin. From this first revelation, more secrets unfold, including the true nature of the bonds between Zephra, Mabry and her dead husband, and even between Avie and her siblings. Spence's prose is deft, forceful and quirky ("my thoughts darted in every direction, small, excitable fishes"), but never overbearing, and her alternating narrators (Avie, Zephra and Mabry) have delightful voices. And when sparks fly between the agnostic Avie and a young pastor, Spence handily provides comic relief and the pleasures of young love. Despite an ending in which loose ends are tied up a little too tidily, Spence, who garnered much praise for her 1999 collection, MissingWomen and Others, delivers a true winner.
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- PublisherPiatkus Books
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 0749935944
- ISBN 13 9780749935948
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages227
- Rating
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