Undressing the Moon - Hardcover

Greenwood, Tammy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031228473X ISBN 13: 9780312284732

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2002

Synopsis

As a child, Piper Kincaid always felt her mother was on the edge of leaving. And then the summer Piper turns fourteen, it really happens. Devastated by this loss, and the rejection she feels from her increasingly distant father, she finds an uneasy comfort with an older man who is equally riddled with sorrow. Discovering desire for the first time, Piper is at first fascinated and strengthened by the attention. But with time, the growing weight of their secret and his need begin a devastating avalanche of events neither is able to control nor understand.

Now, Piper is thirty years old and dying of breast cancer. Reflecting on her life, she is drawn ineluctably back to that summer and haunted with regret. As she attempts to reassemble the fragments of her history, what emerges is the kaleidoscopic portrait of a young woman whose indefatigable spirit prevails, despite shattered dreams.

An evocative, richly-told novel of coming-of-age and coming-to-terms, Undressing the Moon finds grace in wreckage and hope in a broken life.

About this title

About the Author

T. Greenwood, born in Vermont, now lives in Ocean Beach, California with her husband, Patrick Stewart. She is the author of Breathing Water, winner of the 1999 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award, and Nearer Than the Sky, a Book Sense 76 selection.

Reviews

Piper Kincaid is 30 years old and has already endured three years of treatment for breast cancer. As she considers life with metastatic breast disease, she also returns to the year she was 14, when her mother left and she came to understand how lives get broken. In Greenwood's third novel (after Breathing Water and Nearer Than the Sky), chapters alternate between Piper's story today and 16 years earlier. Her mother collected broken glass and created beautiful pieces of art, but she couldn't live with her husband's fears of losing her. She managed to get away, leaving Piper and her older brother, Quinn, with their father, who eventually found a new girlfriend and ostensibly moved out. How Piper grew up that year without either parent, how she and her best friend, Becca, discovered performing, and how she became aware of the neediness and cruelty of others intersects with Piper's cancer ordeal. Greenwood uses glass to represent both beauty and baseness, creation and destruction, and life and death. This beautiful story, eloquently told, demands attention. Highly recommended. Bette-Lee Fox, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 031228473X
• ISBN 13: 9780312284732
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256