by Dylan Landis
Persea Books
ISBN: 978-0892553549

NEW: A NEWSDAY BEST BOOK OF 2009
An extraordinary mix of the work of Mary Gaitskill and Scott Spencer, this remarkable fiction debut piercingly yet tenderly portrays the inner lives of a girl and her mother in New York City in the 1970s.

In ten stories, written from a variety of perspectives, we follow the uneasy yet magnetic relationships between Leah Levinson, a guarded teenager, and the delinquent girls she worships. Leah and her artistic mother, Helen, struggle against the confines of their pasts and personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are as they make repeated, touching attempts to break free. Just when they seem to have reached an impasse, each makes an impulsive change of place: Leah takes a trip abroad with an endearing young man, and Helen rents, and fantastically ornaments, a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from their old patterns, daughter and mother independently glimpse the possibility of a different, more vibrant life.