Strings Attached
Book 1 of the Venus as She Ages Collection
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves two stories into a seamless narrative - a woman's quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father.
Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult, in one of her father's haunts, she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she overcome a life of defiant independence and her distrust of affection?
Walley's daring prose style allows the writer to make Charlee's rough but endearing past immediate and vital in her present.
"I often think the truth," Charlee supposes, "was that my father lost me in a card game. He was losing; indeed, he lost everything. The men are all sitting around the bar, and this card game is a secret, all-consuming vice of my father's. He will do anything to keep in the game. And he says, 'Okay, I've got nothing except my daughter. When she's eighteen, you can have her. You can take her and do whatever the hell you like.'"
Populated with tough, brilliant characters who crisscross New England, Strings Attached is a novel about the search for love, about the possibilities and impossibilities of that quest. Walley says, "These searching characters fall away and toward each other, as we do in every love affair, and come to their ultimate truths."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This heavy-handed first novel examines a young woman's troubled childhood with her alcoholic father, a history that echoes throughout her adult love life. Abandoned by her mother, Charlee grew up hanging out with her father in one dim, smoky bar after another in the cities and seaside villages of Quebec and New England. Acting grown-up while sipping a Shirley Temple, her earliest friendships were with barmaids in dives where her father's pals would grope her under the table without his noticing. These squalid settings possess a stark, unapologetic grit, and Walley is at her best when she describes the various pubs' dark, otherworldly atmospheres. Yet the mood dissolves under the tedious reflection that characterizes much of the novel, an awkward combination of strained lyricism and the earnest idiom of self-help ("I'm trying to shape my own chaos"). Charlee's story closely follows the trajectory of recovery narratives: her father is gruff, caustic and difficult, but since he's her only family, she's torn between her dogged love for him and her rage over the years of neglect. As an adult, she struggles with her own drinking problem and has a tortured relationship with Peter, an aimless and needy alcoholic whom she can't bring herself to leave. Scenes from Charlee's youth juxtaposed with first-person accounts of her affair with Peter fail to make the story multidimensional or dynamic. The novel circles anxiously around the same scenes, in which Charlee is desperate for love from her father or fighting with the jealous, wounded Peter. Walley establishes the basic tenor of these relationships early in the narrative, but consistently restating the main issues does not give them further depth or add richness or complexity to the characters.
