"Maybe a crisis is what frees people. Maybe we spend our entire lives avoiding what we should embrace." Elizabeth Johnson, the narrator of Corey's sensuous but overwrought second novel (after Losing Eddie), experiences two such crises, the first when the girl's beautiful mother, Doreen, a professional-level figure skater, is hit in the face by a puck while skating at a local pond in the tiny coastal Maine town of Stonington. The injury seems innocuous, but Doreen begins having seizures and dies from complications. Shortly after her funeral, the girl's father, a former lobsterman turned painter, abruptly leaves 15-year-old Elizabeth in order to pursue his artistic career. Somewhat improbably left to live alone, Elizabeth falls into the arms of an older lover, a worldly, married New York architect named Frederick who is smitten by the girl. Their mad affair ends grotesquely, and Elizabeth, pregnant, is rescued by gentle but haunted Michael McDonald, the boy who injured Doreen. They marry and go on to have two children, making a happy but precarious life for themselves, which is disrupted when Frederick comes back to town. Corey's voluptuous descriptions of physical sensations carry the reader pleasantly along, but the characters' solemn pronouncements (" 'She was not without guilt, you know. No woman ever is' ") grow tiresome, and it becomes difficult to overlook the improbabilities of the plot. Juicy and sloppy as an overripe plum, the novel cloys long before its end is reached. (Jan. 7)
Forecast:A few impressive blurbers—Richard Russo, Elizabeth Hardwick—vouch for Corey's novel, but readers may find their recommendations misleading. Regional author tour.
