I am always partial to novels that take place in and around Boston so right away I was predisposed to like this book.

Seriously though, it's a very well written family story about an only child who becomes estranged from her parents and pursues a life very different from the one they imagined for her. In some ways, she seems to repeat or at least shadow, their mistakes, but with just the right amount of psychological awareness on her part - to make it believable. ( )

This book gave me a headache. How do you write so much about what a family doesn't say to each other? I hung in there thinking it would finally all come out in the wash, but no. Seriously disappointed. I picked this from the Bas Bleu catalog, and they usually don't lead me so astray. ( )

Beatrice, the only child of respected Cambridge intellectuals, is poised on the threshold of her adult life; she begins to cross over from childhood to adulthood by writing a letter to her estranged maternal grandmother in Boston. Bea wants to be an actress, and her grandmother Margaret Fourcey was rather famous on stage in her day, and still participates in the theater scene in Boston, hosting a salon of sorts to which Bea hopes to be invited. She also hopes to uncover the secrets that lie in the silence between her mother and grandmother. At the same time, Bea's father has been accused of inappropriate behavior with one of his students, and Bea finds out that this is the first in a long line of complaints against him.

Bea narrates this time in her life from twenty years later, after the events of the spring and summer: her participation in a theater project with her grandmother, her parents' departure from Cambridge to Maine. Though this period is not tremendously eventful externally, Bea evolves and changes internally, coming to understand her own desire to be an actress, and gaining a better understanding of her family and their history. This takes about the first 3/4 of the book, with the last 1/4 taking place in the present: Bea, 41, lives in Manhattan, where she has resided since that summer.

Leah Hager Cohen is immensely talented at describing people in a way that is deeply familiar and resonant with reality. Bea's whole life has been carefully constructed; in a way, she has been acting a part her whole life, without realizing it. At least twice, she ponders whether the best stage acting is "skill at lying, or skill at truth-telling." When she initially approaches her grandmother, it seems as though she is more caught up in the idea of acting than having a passion for acting itself, but participating in her grandmother's salon throughout the spring and rehearsing for the show in the summer, she grows into herself, and sets the course for the rest of her life.

Might also like: The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass, Maine by Courtney Sullivan.

Quotes

Not that either of them had put it in precisely those terms, but that was the beauty of the Fisher-Harts: our talent for intuiting that which had not been said. (7)

"Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." (King Lear, 69)
"Acting...just seemed like the most wonderfully subversive way aof getting at unallowable truths." (Margaret Fourcey, 69)

It leaves room to consider that they wanted me to learn things without having to assume responsibility for telling me. (70)

...the look in his eye was less mortified than wounded - and baffled, as though try as he might, he could discern no justification for the wound. (100)

Excellence in maintaining appearances could compensate for, even be a means of transcending, internal faults and failings. (101)

...the suicide of a parent inflicts irreparable harm on a child...because it is a form of abandonment that annihilates the possibility of resolution. (133)

Of course, that was her specialty: coping impressively with loss. (164)

"Borges says being in love is like creating a religion with a fallible god." (Maggie Fourcey, 188)

...we were privately bored by her sense of injury, and the way she hauled it along everywhere she went, as if on a stubborn, wordless quest for reparations.
But sitting beside my grandmother on the bench, I soaked up the heaviness of her unresolved sorrow, and it seemed to validate my mother's claim: I had to consider that her sense of injury might be just. (190)

Was it always this way? Were children always pressed into the service of their parents' version of reality? (202)

"It's like the shell of our lives has been cracked open; we've been brought low, but now we're also in a way free to grow differently."
She was either very brave or very deluded. It was painful in me, the not knowing which. (208) ( )