Scriber
Hardcover: 304 pages ISBN-978-1416591795 |
ALL THE FINEST GIRLS This vibrant and emotionally searing novel charts the intersection of two lives, two worlds, as it tells the story of a fierce and untamable young girl, growing up “privileged” in a New England household darkened by her parents’ epically unhappy marriage, and the Caribbean nanny who has left her own family a thousand miles behind to live among strangers. All the finest girls moves and surprises with it’s tale of finding a sense of belonging in an unexpected place.
“Haunting…A finely woven, almost delicate tapestry…Styron’s finest achievement is her ability to glide seamlessly between the dialect of St Claire and the cultured language of Connecticut as she pieces together the fragments of each of these women’s lives” “Perfect observations leap off the page…The deftness of the local color and the haunting details of the never-to-be-outgrown pain are promises of good things to come from Alexandra Styron” “Ambitious, moving, even fearless…An impressive, highly charged novel about a virtually taboo subject — nannying — displaying keen insight into the burdens of inheritance in its many forms: money, love, creative temperament.” “In this beautifully controlled first novel, Alexandra Styron re-creates a painful journey through secrets and deceptions of the past to a liberating self-discovery. Her portrait of Louise, the woman who comes from the Caribbean to car for an angry little girl, Addy Abraham, is told with heartbreaking clarity.” “Alexandra Styron’s All The Finest Girls is exquisitely written. This novel enters deeply into the mystery of how we invent ourselves, often despite our families. It subtly forces itself through the various codas of privilege and out the other side so that we see the fullness of a young woman without the suffocation of cultural accoutrements. It is at the same time lyrical and harsh, and the heroine becomes someone we really know, like a friend who makes us sleepless with worry.” |
