HThere's magic in Yorke's second novel, magic in the prose, the details and the exquisite characterizations. Divorced advertising executive and Tarot-card reader Savannah Dawson takes her 15-year-old daughter, Emma, from their San Francisco home to Arizona so that they can spend time with Savannah's estranged mother, Maggie, and her father, Doug, who is dying of cancer. Then Savannah meets Jake, a secretive stranger who is building a special bench for her father's garden; at the same time, Emma meets Eli, the local bad boy who works for Jake. Although the relationships between these four characters form the basis for much of the drama in the story, the romantic elements remain secondary to the explorations of each individual's personality. Readers enter a world where poetry and soil speak for a dying man, where love can create as well as destroy and where all characters are complicit in each other's pain, either by choice or by chance. Yorke (Magic Spells) even has Jake's dog, Sasha, narrate some scenes, and those, together with the scenes revealing Maggie and Doug's difficult, complex, and ultimately loving relationship, are the most poignant in the book. Readers who enjoy contrary characters will especially prize the paradoxes in this well-executed novel. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Description:
From Publishers Weekly
HThere's magic in Yorke's second novel, magic in the prose, the details and the exquisite characterizations. Divorced advertising executive and Tarot-card reader Savannah Dawson takes her 15-year-old daughter, Emma, from their San Francisco home to Arizona so that they can spend time with Savannah's estranged mother, Maggie, and her father, Doug, who is dying of cancer. Then Savannah meets Jake, a secretive stranger who is building a special bench for her father's garden; at the same time, Emma meets Eli, the local bad boy who works for Jake. Although the relationships between these four characters form the basis for much of the drama in the story, the romantic elements remain secondary to the explorations of each individual's personality. Readers enter a world where poetry and soil speak for a dying man, where love can create as well as destroy and where all characters are complicit in each other's pain, either by choice or by chance. Yorke (Magic Spells) even has Jake's dog, Sasha, narrate some scenes, and those, together with the scenes revealing Maggie and Doug's difficult, complex, and ultimately loving relationship, are the most poignant in the book. Readers who enjoy contrary characters will especially prize the paradoxes in this well-executed novel. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From
Savannah Dawson sees magic everywhere, whether at her job in advertising or while reading tarot. Her optimistic view is tested when she reads her own fortune and for the first time turns up a bad card. The cards prove prophetic when her mother calls and tells her to come home to Arizona because her father is dying. With great trepidation, Savannah and her teenage daughter, Emma, leave San Francisco. Although she loves her father, a devoted and gifted gardener, she has never gotten along with her negatively minded mother. When Savannah arrives, Jake, a strange man her mother calls "the psycho," is working on her father's last request--a carved bench for his beloved garden. But as Savannah's dad fades away, his garden thrives, projecting love to those who need it most. Yorke's haunting story is filled with supernatural elements that illuminate the many forms of love that exist in this world, and perhaps in the next. Patty Engelmann
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