Pages for You
A Novel
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4.1 • 36 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A wry, tender novel of sexual and intellectual awakening. Something made her risk a look at the reader, who took a sip of black coffee. And another. She turned the pages. She pursed her lips. Flannery abandoned her breakfast and watched the woman drink her coffee. It wasn't that she wanted the coffee herself. That wasn't it. Rather, she wanted to be the coffee: she envied the dark drink its chance to taste those lips.In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. Flannery, a seventeen-year-old, new to everything around her -- college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life -- is shocked by her own desire to follow this beauty wherever it takes her. By chance she finds herself enrolled in a class taught by the remote, brilliant older woman; intimidated at first, she gradually becomes Anne Arden's student outside class as well. Whatever the subject -- Baudelaire, lipstick colors -- Flannery proves an eager pupil, until one day she learns more about Anne than she ever wanted to know.A bittersweet, exhilarating, sentimental education, Pages for You confirms Sylvia Brownrigg as "one of the most exuberantly agile minds among younger American writers" (Dan Cryer, Newsday) and is her sexiest, most poignant work to date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The narrator of Brownrigg's thoroughly engaging new novel asks this question of her departed lover: "What would happen if I wrote some pages for you? Each day a page... to show you that I am finding a story, the story of how we might have been together, once." What follows is roughly 100 short chapters chronicling the rise and fall of one woman's first love. Flannery Jansen, 17 and fresh from a "one-horse town" in California, falls headlong for a teaching assistant at the tony (and never named) East Coast university she attends. Page by page, Brownrigg captures in delicious and witty prose the rapture and humiliation of first love: first sight, first words, first flirtation, first gift, first kiss, first night, first declaration, first fight and, as the prologue gives away, first betrayal. A lesser writer would be swamped in sentimentality, but Brownrigg handles her material with great good humor and vitality. Readers familiar with Brownrigg's first two books, the novel The Metaphysical Touch and the story collection Ten Women Who Shook the World, know that her characterizations are deft and spare. Here, in pitch-perfect dialogue, she conveys the dueling attitudes of an aspiring writer from the West and a teaching assistant deeply schooled in traditional literary criticism and academic mores. That Flannery's lover, Anne Arden, is a woman is not quite beside the point. The lovers are well aware others might find them "freaks." But refreshingly, Brownrigg doesn't make Flannery and Anne victims. They are simply two girls in love which shouldn't put any readers off. This exquisitely written, bittersweet Valentine of a novel is for any reader who has ever been in a romantic relationship and wants to remember and revel in all the foolish things we do for love.
