Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossom with a late and unexpected love. And all the while, the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family. At once a moving ...
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Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossom with a late and unexpected love. And all the while, the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family. At once a moving evocation of life's inexplicable calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love, "At Weddings and Wakes" is the story of three generations of an Irish-American family through the eyes of its youngest members. With eloquence and grace, master storyteller Alice McDermott transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal.
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Add this copy of At Weddings and Wakes (G K Hall Large Print Book Series to cart. $42.95, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1993 by G K Hall & Co.
Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes is a beautifully composed short novel whose sentences in their sinuous complexity and loveliness slow the reader's eye; they become soundings in the mind. It is the story of an Irish Catholic family: a married daughter, her stepmother, and unmarried sisters: their loves and losses. McDermott's prose moves quickly and fluidly between past and present--the novel's structure is Woolfian--and the narrative is knowing of transience, mortality, those moments of being that constitute a life. The author works on a small canvas, but it's a perfect one.