Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her notable fiction debut (her most recent nonfiction book is Women Together, Women Alone ) Shreve sensitively explores the coming-of-age and later redemption of her hero, events separated by nearly 20 years. A recently divorced New York advertising executive in his mid-30s, Andrew returns to the home of his youth in upstate New York to bury his widowed mother. In the dilapidated house next door live Eden Close and her mother Edith. The novel opens with Andrew dreaming of the night he was awakened by screams from the Closes' house, an incident well remembered: ``The man next door was murdered when I was seventeen. His daughter was raped.'' Blinded by the same gun that killed her father, Eden endures an hermetic existence, zealously guarded by her mother. She and Andrew had been best friends before puberty complicated their relationship, and now Andrew, looking to the past for clues to his future, reconnects with Eden. Readers will have guessed the secret of Eden and her mother long before the story's putative climax, when it is revealed to Andrew and others. Shreve's evocative prose and elegiac voice, and her faithful attention to her likable hero's emotions render him believable and give this romance a weight superior to most in the genre. Film rights to Disney/Hollywood Pictures. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
For Andrew and Eden, it's a modern adaptation of paradise lost and then regained. As next-door neighbors, ``best buddies,'' and then awkward adolescents, Eden and Andy find solace in each other's company until a tragic event occurs as Andy prepares to leave their small home town and heads off to college. The awful accident drives them apart, but then inadvertently draws them together again some 15 years later. Their relationship is rekindled when Andy returns home to attend his mother's funeral. Rather than close the chapter, Andy cautiously explores the remains of his past while trying to solve the mystery that envelops the woman he has always loved. Flashbacks add to this sensitive exploration as Shreve's characters struggle to obtain the ever elusive happy ending.-- Heidi Schwartz, ``Business Interiors,'' Red Bank, N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Nonfictionist Shreve (Remaking Motherhood, 1987) tries her capable hand at a first novel that turns rural gothic horrors into a story of fine, high love. Andrew is 37, successful, and divorced when his mother's unexpected death makes him sole family survivor and brings him back from New York City to the lonely rural farmhouse where he was born and raised. Ostensibly at ""home"" to sort through his mother's effects and make arrangements to sell the farmhouse, Andrew instead finds himself remembering all over again the horrible event 19 years before, when on a hot summer night his next-door neighbor and childhood playmate, the then-14-year-old Eden Close, was raped in her farmhouse bedroom, her father shot dead by the fleeing rapist, and the sexually tantalizing and life-idled Eden herself permanently blinded by stray buckshot. Andrew hasn't seen Eden since that cataclysmic night just before he himself left for college, but now he calls on her, finds that she's being kept virtually as an invalid and prisoner by her secretive and very strange mother, and finds his never-admitted adolescent love for the pale Eden overwhelming him now as an adult. In beautifully rendered scenes (including trips to a childhood swimming hole that's got a special meaning) only occasionally marred by an overreaching for symbols, Andrew gradually draws the hesitant and reclusive Eden out again into life (always behind her rigidly disapproving mother's back), and, before the sweetness of the couple's love can find promise of permanence, there will be new questions about both Eden's and Andrew's parents; fresh doubts about what really happened on that tragic night long ago; and a climax that will hideously repeat history, explain all, and put you on the edge of your chair. Ghost-in-the-closet formula given new life, especially in Shreve's fine handling of the lovable, reemerging Eden. Andrew, too, is as good a guy as they come, and one roots for these two all the way in their almost-doomed love. A compelling page-turner that, by end, is also brimful of goodness. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
