Description:

An injury at birth left Audrey with a wandering eye. Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape while illuminating the rich inner life of a singular girl. ** ### From Publishers Weekly "Not as complex or inventive as Disturbances in the Field ," judged PW , "this slim, nostalgic novel reincarnates, from a contemporary adult narrator's perspective, post-WW II Brooklyn, where conformity, sensible relationships and coherence wage an age-old battle against passion and creativity." Here silver-tongued prose compensates for wobbly plot contrivances. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Library Journal How much of this work is fiction? How much memoir? Schwartz walks the fine line separating fiction and memoir, thereby exploring the role of memory in the creation of art. In the end, she concludes, "If it wasn't a memory to begin with, it has become one now. . . . Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story." The story she tells is of her adolescence, her coming of age in the sheltered world of the 1950s, and more aptly, her emergence from the sheltered life of childhood. Its central metaphor, that of the oddity of vision occasioned by a lazy, or "bad" eye, represents Schwartz's attempt to reconcile the sexually charged chaotic truths she discovers beneath the placid surface of her safe childhood world. Here, Brooklyn is more a state of mind, a state of unendurable innocence, than the sharply concrete place Schwartz can evoke. Recommended. *- Linda Rome, Mentor, Ohio* Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.