Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
A Novel
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
"Brilliant....[The Vietnam era] is vividly captured by Ann Hood."—New York Times Book Review
In 1969, as Peter, Paul and Mary croon on the radio and poster paints splash the latest antiwar slogans, three young friends find love. Suzanne, a poet, lives in a Maine beach house awaiting the birth of a child she will call Sparrow. Claudia, who weds a farmer during college, plans to raise three strong sons. Elizabeth and her husband marry, organize protests, and try to rear two children with their hippie values. By 1985, things have changed: Suzanne, now with an MBA, calls Sparrow "Susan." Claudia spirals backward into her sixties world—and madness. And Elizabeth, fatally ill, watches despairingly as her children yearn for a split-level house and a gleaming station wagon. Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine is Ann Hood's stunning debut novel about the choices we make when we are young, and the changes brought about by the passing of time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hood has written a provocative, uneven tale of three women who were flower-child friends at an unnamed New England college in the late 1960s. Suzanne eventually reverts to a life of which her parents would approveearning an M.B.A., becoming an investment banker, avoiding her past and old friends, and refusing to tell her daughter, Sparrow, about Sparrow's father, Abel, a poet who lives in a house on the coast of Maine. Claudia is semicatatonic following the accidental drowning of her oldest son in the mid-'70s. And Elizabeth, who lives with her potter husband and their children, suffers a bout with cancer. This is also the story of the women's children, particularly of Sparrow's efforts to learn about her father and the love of Claudia's oldest son for Rebekah, Elizabeth's daughter. The narrative is at times rickety and self-conscious, and Hood often seems afraid to take risks with her characters' lives and motivationstoo often a single, extraordinary event rigidly determines their personality forever after. Nonetheless, this is an intriguing work by an author of promise.
