The Skating Pond - Hardcover

Corey, Deborah Joy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786254521 ISBN 13: 9780786254521

Publisher: Thorndike Pr, 2003

Synopsis

Deborah Joy Corey’s The Skating Pond is a masterful and hypnotic exploration of the depths of human needs and desires. Told through the eyes of a young woman who has experienced more than her expected share of pain, this evocative novel explores the hidden truths of our lives with both candor and grace.

In the small fishing village of Stonington, Maine, the local pond is a hive of activity — in the summer, tourists flock to see the lilies in bloom; in the winter, it becomes the local skating pond, with boys playing hockey alongside pleasure skaters gliding around in circles. For young Elizabeth, going skating is less a pleasure than a chore, though watching her mother on the ice is a joy: “she looked like something from a fairy tale, a gazelle, thin-necked and elegant.” Elizabeth also relishes the knowledge that every swish of her mother’s skates is an act of defiance of her father, who sees his wife’s skating as decadence — her proper place is at home, taking care of her family. For Peter, an artist who only paints fishing boats, life is not about taking risks, but living in fear of the past, of the future, and anything that could possibly bring you harm.

One winter Saturday, both parents and Elizabeth head down to the pond — Peter with his sketchbook, Doreen wearing a sequined skating skirt that looks like neon when she spins. But in a random accident, a stray hockey puck hits Doreen squarely between the eyes and she crumples to the ice. With this event, Elizabeth’s life changes completely.

Horribly disfigured, Doreen begins to hide herself from the outside world, her condition worsening every day. And when Doreen’s husband disappears one night with his new art dealer, leaving only a note, Elizabeth is left to care for her mother alone. Then when Doreen dies, the 15 year old is left to raise herself. With only her new dog for company, besides the visits from the boy next door who comes to check up on her, she gets by on macaroni and tomatoes and stops going to school. Elizabeth loses herself in solitude, until one day she begins an affair with a stranger, a visiting architect named Frederick who is her father’s age. In their sexually intense relationship she tries to find rescue, to learn what crucial element is missing from her own life. But when he leaves, and leaves her pregnant, it’s as if the world’s been ripped out from around her again. The neighbour Michael steps forward to marry her — yet despite her best efforts to have a “normal” life and raise their family, she never feels that her life is complete, or recovers from her grief, or truly loves. It is only when Frederick reappears, a decade later, and tragedy once again threatens to tear her world apart, that Elizabeth is forced to come to terms with her heart’s truths.

Rich in images and language that will transport you into the emotional landscape of one small town, The Skating Pond is a heart-wrenching yet beautiful book, one that reaches into the core of human longing. Deborah Joy Corey explores how love and desire, belonging and grief, can shape our very beings — the effects rippling through her characters’ lives until tragic events send them flowing in new directions once again.

About this title

Review

The titular Skating Pond of Deborah Joy Corey's long-awaited second novel is the site of a terrible accident that reveals the cracks in 14-year-old Elizabeth's troubled family life. The daughter of an aloof painter and a frustrated Canadian beauty with an untapped gift for figure skating, Elizabeth spends winter afternoons watching her mother practice spins near their home in an isolated New England fishing village. When a stray hockey puck hits her mother in the forehead, Elizabeth once again finds herself on the sidelines. This time, however, she becomes a silent witness to the inexorable process by which a disfiguring facial injury not only destroys her parents' marriage but also robs her mother of sanity and life itself.

Elizabeth survives the loss of her family only to enter a passionate and increasingly hostile relationship with an older man who is not unlike her self-absorbed artist father. Her inability to free herself from Frederick's icy grip forms the central drama of this Gothic tale, and ultimately leads her to make an error in judgment with reverberations almost as disastrous as the accident on the pond. Elizabeth's moving account of her parents' break-up is reminiscent of Corey's first novel, Losing Eddie, in which a nameless nine-year-old records, with chilling dispassion, the collapse of her own family. In the latter half of The Skating Pond, however, Elizabeth's voice suffers from a surfeit of romanticising imagery, obscuring her motivations and those of other characters in a haze of purple prose. Corey remains a dazzling stylist but this novel lacks the precision that made Losing Eddie such an emotional tour de force. --Lisa Alward, Amazon.ca

Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786254521
• ISBN 13: 9780786254521
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 257