Playing Botticelli
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Godiva Blue thinks she controls the world she has created for her daughter Dylan and herself in a neglected corner of North Florida. While her fellow college activists have become Reagan-era yuppies, Godiva—an elementary-school janitor who is also an avant-garde artist and avowed nonconformist—staunchly refuses to compromise her ideals. Then one day she glances at the wanted posters hanging in her local post office and recognizes the face of a man she hasn’t seen since 1969: Dylan’s father. Shaken, Godiva grabs the poster and takes it home. When 15-year-old Dylan, already secretly chafing against her mother’s out-sized personality, finds the photograph, the discovery rocks the very foundation of their relationship. Fueled by simmering adolescent resentment, Dylan sets out across America to look for the father she’s never known. Left behind and powerless to protect her daughter, Godiva must finally confront the choices she made long ago. By turns funny, scary and reflective, Playing Botticelli follows Godiva and Dylan deep into the uncharted territories of their hearts as they seek that elusive balance between autonomy and family love?
About the Author
Jack-of-all writing trades Liza Nelson has been an essayist, editor, journalist, columnist, dramaturge, poet and novelist. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications from the underground paper The Great Speckled Bird to Ploughshares to The N.Y. Times. Her blog aliceinmemoryland.com deals with her experiences Alzheimer’s and marriage. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her poetry and a James Beard Award for her food writing in A Book of Feasts. Years ago she reluctantly moved to a Georgia cattle farm that she’s grown to love although it no longer raises anything but mosquitoes, wild flowers and the occasional tomato.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fertile depths of mother-daughter relationships are plumbed with sparkling humor and sharp-edged wisdom in Nelson's impressive debut. The year is 1986, and the wonderfully named Godiva Blue--n e Judy Blitch--a product of the '60s, is living with her proverbial love-child, 15-year-old Dylan, on the Gulf coast of Florida, where she has created an unconventional lifestyle as a funky single mom who supports her art and her child by working as a janitor at the local elementary school. Nelson captures the sense of time-warp felt by '60s activists who became alienated adults in what they saw as the spiritually moribund '80s. She also skillfully underscores the irony that mothers who came of age in a revolutionary generation still harbor the conventional desire to protect their children, no matter how rebellious they may have been in their own adolescence. Godiva's life is thus up-ended when Dylan discovers an FBI wanted poster in her mother's belongings, instantly recognizes the man as her father and, unbeknownst to Godiva, sets out by herself to look for him. Although Dylan comes off sounding more like a college student than a 15-year-old, her journey to find her father is filled with self-revelation and experiences that showcase the trusting innocence of youth as well as the particular vulnerabilities of a teenager alone in the world. Only when Godiva and Dylan are apart from one another do they come to understand and appreciate the depth of their attachment. Nelson takes them each on an emotional voyage that ultimately strengthens the bond between mother and daughter.
