Kirjahaku

Julie Prince is a top college student, destined for conventional success. But then she falls in love with Neil, a radical graduate student, and abandons her privileged East Coast life to tree-sit in the forests of Oregon. At first it is a romantic field trip; soon, though, Julie finds herself increasingly moved by the magnificence of the endangered forest and, like Neil, invested in its protection. Eventually pulled into a militant act of sabotage, Julie is forced to reassess her deepest held loyalties and beliefs.

Renata, a waitress, has left her boyfriend Bryan without telling him he is about to become a father. She drives cross-country to begin a new life in Boston with her baby son, Charlie, hoping to stay free of emotional entanglements and the associations of a painful childhood. Eleanor, a seventy-eight-year-old widow, finds herself gradually stripping away the layers of complication in her life until she is living in virtually a plain white room. June, a young dance student, is dangerously obsessed with thinness to mask her loneliness. The three women, from very different social backgrounds and age, meet by chance and their lives become unexpectedly linked. An emergency involving baby Charlie and the unannounced appearance of Bryan culminates in a dramatic and satisfying conclusion.

Greg Goodman is a very ordinary guy-a not-very-ambitious school teacher and football coach who takes his attractive wife, Patty, their twin adolescent daughters, and the comfortable ease of their suburban routine for granted. Until lightening strikes-both literally and figuratively-as Greg runs a pattern with his junior varsity team during a muggy August practice and fifteen-year-old Timothy Phelps is directly struck. This crisis threatens to unravel all the strands anchoring Greg to his normal habits of being. When Timothy's mother, a stripper and addict who abandoned Timothy as a child, enters the mix, Greg discovers his own complicated and misguided longings. As in her debut novel, Suzanne Matson employs "crisp, clean writing . . . [and] compassionately drawn characters" (New York Times Book Review) to create a gripping story about the nature of love, trust, family, and marriage. Set in a seemingly safe world of split-levels and carefully tended lawns, A Trick of Nature powerfully captures the characters' emerging self-awareness as they are forced to test the assumptions they hold about themselves and the connections that bind them.