Invisible River
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When Evie and her father say good-bye at the train station, they
are both on their own for the first time since her mother's death. But
Evie is not lonely for long. At art school in London, she is quickly
caught up in colors and critiques, gallery visits and sketching
expeditions. She finds fiercely loyal friends-Rob, pragmatic and
pregnant; Bianca, dramatic and Italian; and Cecile, the sidelined
ballerina-and stumbles tentatively toward a relationship with Zeb, a
second-year sculptor with hair blue-black like a crow.
But
when her father arrives in the city, sour with alcohol and slumped on
the doorstep of her new home, Evie must determine what she owes her
past, and how it will shape the life, and the art, she's trying to
create.
Gently and genuinely observed, written with painterly beauty, Invisible River is an unforgettable novel of the mysteries, desolations, and heart-soaring hopes of entering adulthood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scottish writer McEwen makes her American debut with her third novel, a treacly coming-of-age story. Eve has left her alcoholic father behind in Cornwall to study painting in London, where she befriends the flamboyant Bianca and the brooding Roberta, and sets her sights on a second-year sculpture student named Zeb. Eve struggles to find her artistic voice and suffers several scathing critiques by the school tutors, who tell her she's making "souffl " when she should be cooking up "meat and potatoes." When Eve comes home from school one day to find her father passed out drunk on her apartment doorstep, she is saddled with both guilt at having left him to live on his own and anger at his intrusion into her new life. Her artwork starts to change as a result, but is no more warmly received. Instead of a story, McEwen gives readers a chronology of events, lackluster writing that seems more fitting for a high school drama, and a pile of melodrama. A story for a therapist, not a reader.
