Quickening : A Novel

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Mandy, a young woman from a small, blue-collar town leaves home to begin college, gratefully escaping a troubled family life and a dead-end future. But the sudden death of her father destroys the stability of her fragile new world and makes it seem frivolous in light of her widowed mother's loneliness and financial worries. Unable to stay in college and unwilling to return home, Mandy takes refuge in an intense relationship with a young man from her town, and soon leaves college to move in with him.Over the six-month course of the novel, Mandy begins this second attempt at forging her own life, at achieving quickening, the awakening of her own self referred to in the novel's title. But like so many young women, Mandy is more comfortable responding to others' expectations of who she should be than creating a life of her own making. It is only when she discovers she is pregnant that she realizes that once again the direction of her life is going to be chosen for rather than by her. Finally Mandy is forced to act for herself, to admit that to not make a choice is a choice in itself.Written with humor and groat perception in a completely natural, honest voice, Brown's first novel has a gritty, realistic edge that brings to mind the work of Wally Lamb or an urban Bobbie Ann Mason.

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