Fishlight: A Dream of Childhood (Complete Works of Cecile Pineda series) - Softcover

Pineda, Cecile

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930324676 ISBN 13: 9780930324674

Publisher: Wings Press, 2001

Synopsis

Told in the voice of a five-year-old girl who sees more than she understands, this novel chronicles her passage through sickness, the separation of her parents, and a maze of secret lives, all with the richness of her budding imagination.

About this title

About the Author

Cecile Pineda received a National Endowment Fiction Fellowship to write The Love Queen of the Amazon, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

From Publishers Weekly

"A Dream of Childhood" is an appropriate subtitle for this impressionistic semiautobiographical novel. Moving on from her clever parody of magic realism, The Love Queen of the Amazon, Pineda tells the melancholy story of five-year-old Cecile, who lives in a tiny New York City apartment with her bizarre and often cruel parents. Emilio is her prophet-in-training Mexican father who either spends time alone in his room cutting up newspapers or perusing a mysterious book that eventually gets him kicked out of the house. He stretches Cecile's imagination and helps to form her view of the world by telling her such things as "Everyone could have a double somewhere" and "God is sadly inexperienced." Emilio suffers a strained relationship with his wife, Cecile's high-strung Swiss mother, whom he calls Purtzi. She has "eel glass eyes" when she's upset, which is often, and maintains an aloof detachment around her inquisitive daughter. Among the Mommy Dearest highlights, Purtzi locks Cecile out of the apartment when she's caught playing with her mother's makeup, and takes her to be displayed naked in front of a friend's psychology class. Rebellious Cecile is wounded by her mother's actions, but not cowed: she does what she wants regardless of the consequences, thus protecting her inextinguishable inner spark. Pineda ably captures the fragmented, superintense perceptions of a precocious child, constructing this poignant fictional memoir in crystalline, poetic prose. (Feb.)Forecast: Pineda's peripatetic publishing history Viking Penguin published her first two novels; Little, Brown her third; and now she has come to rest at Wings suggests the difficulty of selling her idiosyncratic, unpredictable work, but her ability to couch sharp observations in lyrical prose has not changed. With the proper review attention, Wings' plan to reissue uniform editions of her first novels in concert with three new novels over the next three years should help raise her profile.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wings Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0930324676
• ISBN 13: 9780930324674
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 116