Quickening
A Novel
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Our lives all contain growth spurts--physical ones, most obviously, but intellectual and emotional ones as well. This acutely powerful debut novel focuses on just such a time in the life of a nineteen-year-old girl. Mandy Boyle is leaving home for the first time to begin college, full of ambition and anticipation, more than ready to sever ties with her blue-collar family and their backwater town in upstate New York. Over the next six months, Mandy's life is transformed, but hardly in the way she'd anticipated. Her father's sudden death acts as a disruptive catalyst on her own life, and overnight, it seems, her childhood ends. Mandy drops out of college, moves to New York City with a man she hardly knows, goes to work, and gets herself caught in an agonizing situation that she didn't choose but is entrapped by nonetheless.
The stage in a pregnancy when a fetus first shows signs of having a life of its own is known as the "quickening"--a milestone of development as important and dramatic as when a young person leaves home for the first time. The story of Mandy's quickening--her emotionally wrenching growth spurt--is an affecting, engrossing read, about real people making real choices, reacting to the unexpected turns a life can take. Brown's writing evokes comparisons to that of pragmatic, perceptive novelists like Wally Lamb, Elizabeth Berg, and Mona Simpson as she describes a young woman's growing, acting, and choosing, for the first time, a life for herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown's surefooted debut novel takes its title from the term used to describe the time when a fetus's movement distinguishes it as having a separate life of its own. In 1985, in rundown upstate Ransomeville, N.Y., Miranda "Mandy" Boyle is preparing to depart for college. Finally, she will be able to escape from her hypochondriacal mother, who crushes Mandy under the weight of her obsessive scrutiny. Once at Albany State, Mandy's dreams of privacy and the opportunity to reinvent herself are realized, at least in part. But tragedy strikes when Mandy's father's dies. An enormously obese barroom philosopher whom she adores, he had been her intellectual mentor, and Mandy thinks that she has been bereft of the wrong parent. Feeling abandoned and helpless, she resists her nagging mother's demands to come home and her roommate's pleas that she get counseling. Instead, she throws herself into the arms of "the one person I didn't need forgiveness from," another fugitive from Ransomeville, a drainage ditch cleaner named Booner who convinces her to move into his filthy apartment in New York City. In addition to an office job, Mandy signs up for a photography class, using her father's old 35-millimeter camera and learning to see her world in new ways. But an unwanted pregnancy seems to presage a future with Booner that for the first time she has the insight and courage to resist. With the nearly Sisyphean task of overcoming her dismal past, Mandy is a heroine worth rooting for. When she recognizes the power of choice in determining her own course in life, most readers will cheer, even if the path she ultimately chooses would not be acceptable to everyone. 4-city author tour, with Elizabeth Berg