Angels in the Morning

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 24 MAR 2003

Ten-year-old Gabriel spends a fateful summer with her Parisian family in the French countryside and learns more than she ever wanted to about the vagaries of adult relationships. At the opening of Troyan's well-wrought debut, set in the 1970s, Gabriel's father announces to Gabriel and her younger sister, Alex, that he is having an affair. He leaves the family, and Gabriel's flighty and emotionally fragile mother becomes withdrawn and soon starts seeing a local doctor. Gabriel's beloved Granny; her outspoken great-aunt, Ethel; and her governess, Juliet, do their best to look after the girls. But the hard-drinking Juliet, who suffers from wild mood swings and mildly entertaining irritability, has her own problems, namely, her lover, the family's chauffeur, who jilts her. It's an old story, but Troyan tells it particularly well, capturing a wealth of subtle details social and sensual, heartbreaking and funny through Gabriel's eyes. ("I watch Ethel eat her prunes. She puts one in her mouth and then she slowly moves it round just like she does with her mint, then she puts her hand in front of her mouth and spits her pit into her hand before hiding it in a paper napkin. She keeps pushing prunes across the kitchen table to Granny, but Granny keeps pushing them back.") These sorts of minute observations occasionally overwhelm the story, but readers willing to lose themselves in the evocative details will find Troyan's narrative rewarding and her preteen heroine's voice pitch perfect.