A Certain Slant of Light
A Novel
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
At the heart of Cynthia Thayer's debut novel, Strong for Potatoes, was the tender relationship between a girl and her grandfather, constantly evolving as their lives grew and changed. Now, in Thayer's second novel, she tackles another kind of relationship, one between strangers.
Peter lost his wife and children in a fire years ago, yet the wounds are still as fresh as if it happened yesterday. He's turned into something of a hermit in a cabin on the coast of Maine, shearing sheep and gardening to live, an old Passamaquoddy woman his only friend. Elaine is eight months pregnant and on the run from her husband, a hard man more interested in control than love. Fear is simply a part of her life, fear for herself and her unborn child.
When Elaine turns up outside Peter's cabin during one of Maine's worst winter storms in years, Peter can't turn her away into the ice. Holed up together in his one-room home, the two troubled, lonely adults clash, then slowly discover that friendship, support, and healing can come in the most unlikely places.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A hermit opens his heart to love in Thayer's moving second novel (after Strong for Potatoes), which takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson. When a fire kills his wife, son and daughter, Peter MacQueen retreats to his coastal cabin in Maine, interacting with nobody except Dora, an old Passamaquoddy Indian, and his faithful pet, Dog. He also finds solace in his bagpipes, his few books and a mournful ritual involving his dead daughter's dollhouse, but a guilty secret relentlessly haunts him. A pregnant woman, Elaine, on the run from her cruel husband, shows up on his property, desperate for shelter from a winter storm; the two share a bittersweet healing. Initially irritated by Elaine's presence, Peter eventually opens a tentative crack in his emotional door. Elaine tells him about the miscarriage she suffered when she was a teenager and about the excruciating tensions of growing up with healthy hormones in a restrictive Jehovah's Witness environment. After Elaine's daughter is born and named Azelin--"Spared by Jehovah"-- Elaine must decide whether to stay or return to her husband. Thayer's tale is deeply poetic and quasi-Freudian, with the dollhouse in Peter's cabin serving as a potent symbol of the characters' unconscious desires. The other central motif is Elaine's pregnancy: ideas of renewal, fear and sacrifice in bringing forth new life come to the surface when it becomes clear that Azelin may need a blood transfusion, which Elaine's religion prohibits. If Thayer is heavy-handed with such themes, her characters are plainspoken and lucid as well as complex, and their progress toward emotional healing becomes an engrossing story with inspirational power.
