A Student of Weather

In a story set against the backdrop of Dust Bowl Canada of the 1930s, the two Hardy sisters--Lucinda and Norma-Joyce--fall for the same man, Maurice Dove, a visitor to the Saskatchewan farm of their widower father, igniting an emotional storm that has a profound impact on their lives. By the author of A Student of Weather. 30,000 first printing.

"... an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx. ... I wanted to go back to the beginning and start again."

"Two sisters fell down the same well, and the well was Maurice Dove." Acclaimed Canadian short story writer Hay's first novel, recently shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize, is a compelling and highly original debut telling the story of two sisters and the jealousy that irrevocably changes their lives when a young student comes to stay on their father's Saskatchewan farm in the 1930s. Ernest Hardy is widowed, a single father raising two young girls on the rural prairies, when twenty-something Maurice Dove arrives from Ottawa to study the region's unusual weather patterns. Eight-year-old Norma Joyce, dark, fiercely intelligent, and inflicted with early puberty, claims Maurice from the first moment she sees him, albeit unrequitedly. Her sister, the "beautiful, saintly" Lucinda, 17, falls deeply in love. After Maurice leaves and his letters stop coming, Lucinda suffers a two-month-long deep depression. Seven years later, the sisters cannot forget Maurice. The Hardy family inherits a relative's house and moves to Ottawa, on the same block as the Dove family home. What occurs between then teenaged Norma Joyce (who will likely invite comparisons to Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed) and the war-damaged Maurice brings to light a childhood betrayal significant enough to devastate everyone involved. Moving seamlessly through 30 years in Saskatchewan, Ottawa and New York City, Hay's novel offers up just the right combination of melodrama and melancholy. Already a best seller in Canada, it should soar this side of the border, too.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Canadian author Hay's first novel begins on a Depression-era farm in Saskatchewan. The Hardy sisters, Norma Joyce and Lucinda, live with their widowed father. The sisters are opposites in appearance and in their approach to life. Norma Joyce, the dark, homely sister, is full of intellectual curiosity with artistic abilities, while Lucinda, older, blonde, and beautiful, is quiet and domestic. Thus, in some ways, they are natural rivals. When both fall in love with Maurice Dove, a student who stays with the family to study weather patterns, this unrecognized rivalry leads to mutual betrayals and a sad lack of family affection and understanding that affects the quality of their lives for nearly 30 years. As the story progresses, Hay's lyric descriptions of emotions, the prairie, the weather, and other natural conditions compel the reader's attention to the last page. Recommended for large public and academic libraries. Cheryl L. Conway, Univ. of Arkansas Lib., Fayetteville
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Canadian writer Hay brings her extraordinary attunement to the sensuousness of landscape to her mesmerizing first novel, which begins circa 1930 on the drought-ravished prairies of Saskatchewan, the home of two motherless sisters. The elder, Lucinda, is fair and diligent, Norma Joyce dark and willful, and both fall for a handsome, rambling botanist from fabled Ottawa, Maurice Dove. An aura of romance surrounds Lucinda and the charming stranger, but even though Norma Joyce is only eight, she is overtaken by a blazing love for Dove that turns her both monstrous in her scheming and nearly saintly in her devotion. As the sisters embark on a tragic rivalry that will determine the course of their lives, their story becomes a fairy tale in which solitude, work, art, and desire acquire mystical significance as Hay adroitly weaves their passions into luminous descriptions of extreme weather and the grand cycle of the seasons. Painterly in its lyricism, profoundly female in its voluptuousness, and acute in its psychology, Hay's contemplative yet dramatic ballad to beauty, autonomy, and creativity is akin to the work of Alice Hoffman and Isabel Allende and as enthralling as a sunset or a blizzard. --Donna SeamanSimply executed, the adult coming-of-age novel reflects life when we were young, but the more successful ones do more than summarize childhood in one epiphanous moment. Also, the protagonists are much more complex than those found in the typical YA novel, particularly the characters found in the classic coming-of-age work, including Twain's Huck Finn, Nelson Algren's Dove Linkhorn, and Toni Morrison's Claudia Macteer, narrator of Pecola Breedlove's tragedy in The Bluest Eye, which was Morrison's first novel. Listed below are some of the most successful coming-of-agers we reviewed over the last year. (Novels published after November 2000 were not considered.) Donna Seaman
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