Synopses & Reviews
Review
"This novel depicts 'the inexhaustable mystery of love found and lost' by Stephen, an Iowa farmer, and his ex-wife Angela, a southern California housewife. After a first chapter depicting their newlyweds' initiation into farm life, cleaning a cellar filled with fetid garbage, we find them 16 years later, divorced, conferring on the phone about how to tame their reckless daughter, Dulcie. She catalyzes much of the action, whether unwittingly tempting her bathrobe-clad, pregnant mother to follow her pack of friends on a 2 a. m. trip to the beach and swim out naked to retrieve her, or necessitating the reunion of her estranged parents. Angela and Steven are charmingly honest, as they struggle to improve themselves, but it is the wild, guileless Dulcie who keeps us up late—reading." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
About the Author
Robert Boswell is the author of the acclaimed books Dancing in the Movies, Crooked Hearts, The Geography of Desire, Mystery Ride  and Living to be a Hundred.He is the recipient of many awards for his work, including a National Endowment for the Arts Felloship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Iowa School of Letters Award for short fiction.He lives with his wife, the writer Antonya Nelson, and their children in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Telluride, Colorado.