Description
<p>A mythical jewel of a story… A true story told on a beach in Yucatan, A Shadow tells Stephanie's story but it was also the story of the golden time. Its nostalgia sings like cicadas in the heat.</p><p>An American ‘Under Milkwood’, this distilled novel of the Sixties evokes the sounds, music and optimism on the free-wheelin streets and parks of Coconut Grove. You can hear Bob Dylan still strumming acoustic; smoke a joint with Fred Neil; and Everybody’s Talkin is carried on the wind.</p><p>Stephanie, a young hairdresser living in lodgings finds herself pregnant. Refused help from her hard Catholic mother in New York, unable to abort her baby, she accepts the kindness of Miriam, her Jewish landlady, whose own barren life spills into compassionate assistance for the daughter she never had.</p><p>The poignancy of its ending, its generosity and acceptance, echoes the bitter disappointment of those of us who hoped for so much more, but who remember its joy, and its promise, as though untarnished by time.</p>
Story Behind The Book
On a hot, summer afternoon while attending my Aunt Lois' funeral in South Carolina, I noticed a young boy at the cemetery in a state of extreme grief. Suddenly a voice in my head said, "This is the beginning of the story." Nothing happened for a couple of years, but when it finally did the funeral scene ended up halfway through the book. Also, it was sleeting and winter. That is the mystery of writing.
Reviews
<p><span style="color:rgb(17,17,17);font-family:'Amazon Ember', Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">"</span><span style="color:rgb(17,17,17);font-family:'Amazon Ember', Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">This book reads like a ballad. It could be set to music even. You can hear the words sing on every page. You can almost sing them. When the author describes a North Carolina mountain waterfall, you hear it, smell the moss on the rocks, breathe in the mountain air.It's pure poetry and a joy to your senses."</span></p>
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<div><span>Ruth Moose, <span style="font-weight:700;">The Pilot </span> </span></div>
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