Pages for You - Softcover

Brownrigg, Sylvia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312420048 ISBN 13: 9780312420048

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

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About this title

Review:

Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for You is the story of a sentimental, sensual education, a love affair between a student and a teacher--all blushes, kisses, books and poetry. Flannery is just 17 and a first-year student at an American university; Anne, a lecturer, is 28: "wise, well-travelled, sophisticated". Flannery sees this red-haired, red-lipped goddess drinking coffee in a diner, wearing "pointed, pretty, argumentative boots", and is immediately smitten. Her dreams begin to taunt her with a "bawdy vividness", and much to her surprise the dreams become a reality, when Anne returns her affections. The story is beautifully paced, in small, concise chapters, each capturing a moment in an intense emotional experience. The prose is lyrical and a little gauche, mirroring Flannery's youth and her enthusiasm for literature--she is a poet in the making, and her heartfelt narration of her own story reflects that. If Desdemona loved Othello partly for his stories, than Flannery loves Anne partly for the content of her bookshelves. The novel is lush with sensation and impression; a recognition of the physical passion that the two women share:

If doubt had smouldered in Anne at first, the sex extinguished it ... Her questions were silenced by their pleasure calls, and the smoothness and the fluidity of their limbs together calmed her.

The novel is intimate and romantic, vivid as the "passionate hot fall of the autumn leaves with their brilliant reds, yellows and golds". --Eithne Farry

Review:

"With an admirable respect for the importance of youthful passion, Sylvia Brownrigg spins out this modern version of the age-old story of first love and sexual initiation." --Maria Russo, The New York Times Book Review

"Page by page, Brownrigg captures-in delicious and witty prose-the rapture and humiliation of first love . . . 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." --Publishers Weekly

"The love affair is delightfully rendered and sharply written, tracing the arc of Flannery's discovery not only of erotic pleasures but of intellectual ardor and the wider horizons of adult life in general." --Bethany Schneider, Newsday

"A pitch-perfect evocation of a young woman journeying through a year awakenings . . . The novel is not about the 'idea' of two women in love, though Brownrigg's unabashedly honest portrait of same-sex desire is certain to nourish gay and lesbian readers. But it is her invention of such a winning heroine as Flannery that will compel bookish types of all sexual orientations who recall the thrill and anguish of growing up to identify with her plights of passage. For this elegantly rendered, poignant novel is ultimately about awakenings both bright and rude, the intoxicating nature of desire, and the realization that love can devastate just as easily as it exalts." --The Village Voice

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312420048
• ISBN 13: 9780312420048
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272