Overview
Paperback in Good (G) condition. Light wear.
Exploring the timeless themes of family, self, misfortune, and hope that have made the novels of Anna Quindlen and Sue Miller bestsellers, Joni Rodgers's moving and powerful tale tells the story of three women bound together by loss and set free by love. Pia feels the walls of her life closing in around her, until she discovers a strangely sensual world that leads her to a new existence. Lily, Pia's brash, tough-talking sister, makes a tragic mistake that leaves her incarcerated, body and soul. But when she finds the last thing she expects—love—she is at last able to face the past. Publishers Weekly Rodgers's somber novel (following her memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair), weaves a tapestry of three Houston women's lives, each touched by bereavement. Pia, a high-powered career woman and mother of grown twin sons, unravels after the unexpected death of her husband, Edgar, on the night of December 31, 2000. Though she remarries a few years later, she suffers debilitating agoraphobia and severs herself from human connection except for the occasional phone call to her incarcerated sister, Lily. Serving a seven-year sentence for the manslaughter of her five-year-old niece, Easter, in a drunk driving accident, Lily struggles to accept responsibility for the child's death. Rodgers crafts Lily's stark, stripped-down narrative from journal entries, transcriptions of her phone conversations and quotes from the books she reads in the prison library. Beth, Easter's grieving mother and a less fully realized character than her sisters-in-law Lily and Pia, renders her world in equally bleak terms-"good days" or "not good days," a conceit that tires quickly. Rodgers is at her best when she choreographs an intersection of the three narratives, as when Beth finds Pia bloodied in her bathtub from a suicide attempt. It is in these interstices that the story delivers and "the secret sisters" attempt to resurrect their lives.