Galaxy Girls: Wonder Women : Stories

Literature & Fiction

Pierce, Anne Whitney

United States

Helicon Nine Editions

Following a drunken celebration of a college hockey victory, a car goes off a bridge and plunges into a river. The passenger, a young woman, escapes; the driver, her boyfriend, drowns. In a clear, compelling voice, Leo Baye, narrator of Anne Whitney Pierce's powerful first novel, traces the aftermath of a tragedy - struggling with guilt over her own survival and slowly coming to terms with the less-than-perfect nature of the relationship she has lost. Though a star of the Harvard hockey team, Danny McPhee had remained at heart a Cambridge "townie" whose Irish-American family ran a fish market. Danny's memory continues to exert a powerful influence, even as Leo begins to resume her normal life as a student at the Beacon Conservatory, working on her thesis and practicing the music that will be her audition piece. She forces herself to go through the motions of daily life, taking the bus and playing her violin, and she begins to reconsider her relationship with Danny, a frustrated young man who was constantly on the verge of violence. Her efforts to reconstruct her life, however, are dealt a severe setback when she learns she is pregnant with Danny's child.

Rain Line: A Novel (Hardscrabble Books)

Literary

Univ Pr of New England

"To this day, I wonder if Danny knew he was going to die." Following a drunken celebration of a college hockey victory, a car goes off a bridge and plunges into a river. The passenger, a young woman, escapes; the driver, her boyfriend, drowns. In a clear, compelling voice, Leo Baye, the narrator of Anne Whitney Pierce's powerful first novel, traces the aftermath of a tragedy -- struggling with her guilt over her own survival and slowly coming to terms with the less-than-perfect nature of the relationship she has lost. Though a star of the Harvard hockey team, Danny McPhee had remained at heart a Cambridge "townie" whose Irish-American family ran a fish market. That sense of alienation was perhaps his strongest connection with Leo, another Cambridge native whose dysfunctional family has crossed a line from "shabby genteel" to outright eccentric. Having fled when she was seventeen, Leo is now driven back to the crumbling home of her childhood by confusion and depression, but once there, she must fight to keep from being absorbed again by the familiar routines of her family's precarious existence. Danny's memory continues to exert a powerful influence on Leo, even as she begins to resume her normal life as a student at the Beacon Conservatory, working on her thesis and practicing the music that will be her audition piece. She forces herself to go through the motions of daily life, taking the bus and playing her violin, and she begins to reconsider her relationship with Danny, a frustrated young man who was constantly on the verge of violence. Her efforts to reconstruct her life, however, are dealt a severe setback when she learns that she is pregnant with Danny's child. Anne Whitney Pierce offers a moving, insightful tale of a young woman's efforts to extract meaning from tragedy and rebuild her life on her own terms. Rain Line is a profound, ultimately optimistic novel of grief and recovery.

Rain Line

Genre Fiction

Down to the River is a family saga set in the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Twin brothers, Nash and Remi Potts, have grown up as entitled, Harvard-educated, golden boys, heirs to an old, but dwindling family fortune. With the passage of time, the gold veneer of prosperity begins to chip away, and their lives begin to falter. We meet Remi and Nash in 1968, in their mid-forties and partners in a sporting goods store in Harvard Square. The twins’ marriages are in trouble. Their youngest children, Chickie and Hen (mistakes, they’re often called….), are coming of age during the turbulent urban wilderness of the late 1960s— school bomb threats, racial tensions, war protests and demonstrations at Harvard and beyond. With all hell breaking loose at home, and any semblance of “parenting” hanging ragged in the wind, the two cousins are left largely to their own devices. Suddenly freed from old rules and restrictions, they head out onto the streets of Cambridge, which become their concrete playground, tumbling headlong into a world of politics, sex, drugs, rock and roll.

Down to the River

Regal House Publishing

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Books by Pierce, Anne Whitney