Short History Of A Prince

Walter McCloud was constantly eclipsed by those around him - his beautiful, talented friends, his flamboyant relatives, his golden-boy brother, Daniel. He was always the outsider, never the star. But the summer of 1972 was a turning point in the life of fifteen-year-old Walter. It was the time when he realized that his great passion for dance would never be matched by his talent; the time when he discovered the funny agony of first love' and the time when he watched his brother declining into a cruel, untimely death.

It is only when, twenty-four years later, Walter returns to fight for the survival of his childhood Eden, his family's lakeside summer home, that he finally discovers a way to reconcile himself to the past in a way that gives hope for the future.

Readers love Hamilton not only for the beauty of her prose and the profundity of her story lines but also for her psychological precision and authorial benevolence. As she did in A Map of the World (1994), Hamilton once again knowingly evokes the timbre of midwestern life and the all but unbreachable insularity of families deeply rooted to the land, then examines the effects on such traditionally solid ground of atypical personalities and deep tragedy. Three sisters jointly own a big old house where everyone gathers for holidays and special events. Jeannie is a bit fey, Joyce quietly elegant, and Sue Rawson (always referred to by her full name) an ogre. Or so everyone believes except for Joyce's younger son, Walter McCloud- the prince of the title and the novel's smart, funny, and altruistic narrator- because it is his recalcitrant aunt, butch as she is who opens the world of ballet to her gay nephew, and he is forever grateful. Using holiday gatherings as touchstones, Hamilton tells Walter's story in two time frames; his high-school days in the early 1970s and the present. As a teenager, Walter falls in unrequited love with a fellow dancer named Mitch; forges a lifelong friendship with Mitch's girlfriend; realizes that he'll never make it as a professional dancer; and loses his older brother to cancer. As an adult nearing 40, Walter returns to Wisconsin after a lively but largely frivolous interlude in New York City, accepts a position teaching literature to artistically challenged high-school students, and seeks to heal old wounds. Such elements of plot are involving and resonant, but it is Hamilton's extraordinary insights into human nature that make this novel shine as she transforms ordinary occurrences- a conversation, a prank, a moment of intimacy- into nothing less than intimations of the divine.
-Booklist Upfront / January 1 & 15, 1998

Hamilton brings to her third novel the same qualities of emotional integrity and compassionate understanding that distinguished The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World....
-Publishers Weekly / December 22, 1997

A meditative, slow-moving and thoroughly absorbing family drama- about loving, losing, and holding on to all we can...this is a lyrical, bighearted novel that won't easily be forgotten.
-Kirkus Reviews / January 15, 1998

...Hamilton's forte- depicting adolesccents left not by villainy but by circumstance on the fringes of family life while they figure out ways to raise themselves- is at its most painful clarity in this novel. Highly recommended.
-Library Journal / February 1, 1998