Overview

Just Like Glass is the story of one transformative year in the life of the author's four older siblings and their mother, Ruth. In 1958, just as the school year is ending, Ruth's husband, Bill, is felled by a fatal heart attack. Not knowing what else to do, she loads her grief-stricken children, ages eight to fourteen, into the station wagon with the family dog and drives north to spend the summer at their lakeside camp in western Maine. Told in the several voices of the ones who lived it, this family memoir relates how a tough-as-nails matriarch and the stillness of North Pond set them on the path to healing, even as they struggle to redefine themselves as a family unit, with one unexpected addition.

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9780961415396

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Reviews

""Just Like Glass is a beautiful family tapestry, woven from a blend of voices, real and imagined, historical sleuthing, and a deep and abiding love of a place called 'camp.' The book tracks a year in Amy Wight Chapman's family as they try to piece together their shattered lives after the sudden death of her father before she is born. Cleverly and convincingly using her mother as narrator, she chronicles how her plucky family perseveres through countless challenges, assuaged by retreats to their rustic camp in western Maine."" -ELIZABETH PEAVEY, author and playwright, My Mother's Clothes Are Not My Mother. ""A genre-bending book that brilliantly blends memoir with creative non-fiction, fiction, and reportage. Amy Wight Chapman's writing is as salt-of-the-earth beautiful as her quintessentially mid-century New England family and their universal journey through hope, loss, grief, resilience-and back to hope again, eternal as always."" -RICHARD BLANCO, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood ""Amy Wight Chapman has invented a new form for the family memoir, working in voices, a kind of magical ventriloquism that doesn't seek to hide but to bring to life the family tragedy that brought her into this world. Just Like Glass takes us to a rustic family cabin-what around here we call a camp-and shows us what it means to be rooted and constantly renewed in a place, even if the dad who dreamed it is gone. This sweet book warmed my heart, opened my eyes, and made me sing."" -BILL ROORBACH, author of Lucky Turtle, Temple Stream, and Beep

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