Salt Dancers: A Novel - Hardcover

Hegi, Ursula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684802090 ISBN 13: 9780684802091

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1995

Synopsis

Julia, pregnant at age forty-one, travels through fear, longing, and love on a journey back to childhood when she returns home to the father she has not seen in twenty-three years to learn why her family came apart. 30,000 first printing. $50,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Ursula Hegi teaches creative writing at Eastern Washington University.

Reviews

Readers of Floating in My Mother's Palm and Stones from the River, Hegi's impressive sagas of life in a fictional German village, are acquainted with her storytelling skill, her sinewy yet lyrical prose and her strong moral imagination. In comparison with those page-hefty books, this is a slim volume, but it lacks none of the psychological insights and emotional impact of the earlier novels. For almost a decade of Julia Ives's life in Spokane, Wash., her father was a protective, nurturing presence. He taught her the salt dance, a ritual to help her leave everything she feared behind a line of salt, and he gave her the "trouble people," dolls that can solve your troubles while you sleep. Ironically, these have become metaphors for the emotional safety Julia lost one day when she was nine and her brother Travis a year younger, when her mother left them all without a word and vanished from their lives. Stunned and aching with loneliness, Julia then had to endure her father's frequent drunken assaults; he beat her, demanding that she declare her love for him. College was Julia's passport out of Spokane. Now, 24 years later, pregnant but unmarried at 41, she comes from her home in Vermont to confront her father with her memories, to see her brother, who also bears emotional scars from their childhood, and to try to fathom the mystery of her mother's disappearance. Hegi uses Julia's quest to explore the selective power of memory and the ambiguities that cloud family relationships. She evokes the varied landscape of Washington and the emotional landscape of Julia's memories with equal facility, though she sometimes overindulges in Julia's fantasies of finding her mother. Yet, there is both poignancy and suspense in Julia's journey through her past, and the surprises she encounters in herself as well as others lead to a healing resolution that has the open-ended feel of real life.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hegi, the author of the critically acclaimed Stones from a River , has crafted an exquisite novel of love, loss, and reaffirmation. Haunted by bitter memories of her abusive father and tender memories of the mother who abandoned her, 41-year-old Julia travels home to Spokane, Washington, in order to lay to rest the distorted images of her bleak childhood. Unmarried and pregnant, Julia is convinced that she will be unable to nurture her own child until she comes to terms with the heartbreaking disintegration of her own family. As she struggles to exorcise the demons of her past, she confronts her father, reconnects with her brother, and rediscovers the mother she believed was lost to her forever. In achingly beautiful prose that exacts a huge emotional toll, the author at once shatters and rebuilds the myth of the family unit. A tragic and triumphant tale of the death and resurrection of an indomitable human spirit. Margaret Flanagan

From Intrusions (LJ 4/15/81) to the recent Stones from the River (LJ 1/94), Hegi has been steadily building her reputation. Her publisher is hoping that this tale of a 41-year-old woman who returns home unmarried and pregnant will be her breakthrough novel.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684802090
• ISBN 13: 9780684802091
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240