Elizabeth Percer

I very much liked the device, of introducing multiple sets of characters who are in love in various ways and then putting them in the midst of a natural disaster. For people who live in San Francisco or know it well, the sense of place would be especially captivating.

However, I tired of the exposition of the back stories and, although I had read a review that compared her writing to Ann Patchett's Belle Canto, it was far from that. I found it a bit cliched, too full of similes and metaphors. Had to skim at times.… (mehr)

As an area resident very familiar with the two main settings in this novel, Brookline, MA and Wellesley College, I very much enjoyed the trauma and joys the main character found in each. The young Naomi wrestles with her mother's pushing her away, her father's smothering, and the loss of her next door neighbor and best friend Teddy. The teenaged Naomi finds herself isolated in the rarified towers of Hillary Clinton's alma mater until she is invited to join a campus Shakespeare theatrical troupe and finds a close friend in Jun, daughter of a wealthy Japanese industrialist. Her two worlds collide repeatedly as Naomi shakily survives and blossoms into a remarkable adult. This is a wonderfully written story, worthy of rereading.

"It was almost liberating to think that it was possible to love and discard in the same, swift act."… (mehr)

This started out so promisingly, with sweetly tender descriptions of a girl's childhood intentions (to become a doctor and make artificial hearts to help people who, like her dad, had weak ones) and first love (an adopted Jewish boy with a predilection for sketching yellow birds). But once the boy moved away and the girl went off to Wellesley, I just sortof got lost. Too many indistinguishable female characters in the Shakespearean club and a roommate who faded out of the story contributed to a general sense of aimlessness in the narrative. I actually kept half-expecting the girl to have a lesbian love affair at her all-girls college, but apparently her only undergrad tryst was a one-night stand with a masked, and apparently rather unattractive, visiting professor-- an encounter that felt more than a little squicky, but for all its oddness doesn't seem to have much importance to the story.… (mehr)