Purchase
William Morrow
February 2006
304 pages ISBN: 0060597704 Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Contemporary Women's Fiction
There are places that can remake you -- slippery, gray
places. Places that hold their secrets in the fog and
whisper them on the wind. And when Brandy, a floundering,
trashy, Latin-spewing cocktail waitress, finds herself
drifting across the line between the ordinary world and just
such a place, something fearsome and beautiful happens.
Something changes. Sweeping across centuries and
into the Aleutian Islands of Alaska's Bering Sea, And She
Was begins with a decision and a broken taboo when three
starving Aleut mothers decide to take their fate into their
own hands and survive the devastation of Russian conquest.
The shadow of their heroic and tragic decision reaches
forward across the generations, and as cultural upheavals
undulate through the Aleutian chain, their descendants are
willing to risk even more as the gold rush and World War II
internment threatens their people's survival. Two
hundred and fifty years later, by the time Brandy steps
ashore in the 1980s, Unalaska Island has absorbed their dark
secret, a secret that is both salvation and shame. Brandy
doesn't know why she's there. She's too old and too smart to
be drifting so close to the edge of the known world. As
usual, she is following a man with curly hair and no
long-range goals. She takes a job slinging drinks at the
notoriously dangerous Elbow Room, studies Aleutian history,
learns to ride a motorcycle, and with a practiced psyche
avoids thinking about her withered past and her abandoned
future. She is fighting her own battle for survival, a
battle she does not even recognize. But the
island's secret follows her -- in the odd bathroom graffiti,
the old Aleut women who hike in the night, the unexplained
deaths clouding the island, and the enigmatic smile of a
young Aleut woman sketched centuries before. Brandy begins
to pay attention. She begins to long for her life to change.
In a tense interplay between past and present,
And She Was explores Aleut history, taboos, mummies,
conquest, survival, and the seamy side of the 1980s in a
fishing boomtown at the edge of the world. It leaps across
time and culture to a lost woman, who more than anything
needs to understand the gray shades between heroism and
evil, between freedom and bondage, between this place and
the rest of her life.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|