Sleeping Beauties (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Moore, Susanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067975539X ISBN 13: 9780679755395

Publisher: Vintage, 1994

Synopsis

Susanna Moore's two previous novels have been met with the highest praise. My Old Sweetheart published in 1982, received both the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. And when The Whiteness of Bones appeared in 1989, Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post, hailed it as "magic...magic that lures the reader with the seductions of passion and wit and then rewards him with the surprises that can only come when the home truths of human existence are disclosed through the eyes of a writer with a large and understanding heart." Now, with Sleeping Beauties, Moore gives us her most vividly drawn and emotionally charged novel yet. It is the story of Clio, a thirteen-year-old runaway - from an indifferent father and cruel stepmother - who shows up, "unexpected and uninvited, " at the Honolulu home of her eccentric aunt Emma: "Clio hoped only that the mysterious ties of blood...would wrap their strong tendrils around her." Emma takes her in - and, in exchange, Clio agrees to "talk-story" and to learn the past. Emma is a collector of the legends, myths, and rites of their native Hawaii. Weaving together the history of the islands and the rich, convoluted legacy of their mixed white-and-Hawaiian family, Emma teaches Clio what it means to "swim out of the currents of time, " helping her to exchange her "small past" for a grand one. But as she enters adulthood, that same past begins to take on a crushing weight: "If she could leave the islands...perhaps she'd be able to figure out just what she was meant to do with all of the secrets, all of the chants, and songs, and legends that so filled her head that she could no longer distinguish what was rea from what was myth." An impulsive marriage to a well-known Hollywood actor finally provides Clio with a reason to leave the entanglements of island life and her family. But when her new life in California begins to reveal its own increasingly violent entanglements, Clio is force

About this title

Review:

"Sleeping Beauties expands a body of work that is eloquent and disturbing, by a writer whose fiction continues to open unexpected doors." (New York Times Book Review)

"She writes scenes that can take you breath away. Susanna Moore sings as sweetly as any writer can." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

"The best of [her novels]... Dreamlike and painterly, full of the richness of Hawaiian language, customs and legends, and of the sensuousness of Hawaiian landscape." (USA Today)

From the Back Cover:

Susanna Moore's novel is set in a Hawaii whose shimmering beauty and melancholy traditions are at once seductive and dangerously hard to leave. Or so they prove for Clio, a thirteen-year-old runaway who is raised by her eccentric aunt Emma, a collector of legends, myths, and rites of their native island. Emma teaches Clio what it means to 'swim out of the currents of time', to exchange her small past for a grand one. But when that same past begins to take on a crushing weight, Clio on impuse marries a well-known Hollywood actor, providing her with the promise of escape from her family and the entanglements of island life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 067975539X
• ISBN 13: 9780679755395
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240