Overview

A vessel can heel to one side, but at a certain point, it will no longer balance above water-and it capsizes. This is the angle of vanishing stability. Thea West, a Northern Californian teenager growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, is one of five daughters trying to stay afloat amid the psychologically catastrophic dynamic between her parents-a covert and commanding mother and an ocean-yachtsman father. A talented sailor and businessman, Mr. West suffers from crippling alcoholism, with frequent rages that mask his fragility. Thea longs to know how to sail, but in her world, traversing the water is a skill that belongs only to men, and she's terrified to ask her larger-than-life father to teach her. When her father's demons drive him to a new low, Thea isn't sure if she can ever learn to forgive. She strikes out from home in search of love and self, running from what she views as the problem-her father and his hold on her family. As Thea falls in and out of affairs, marriages, and jobs, her travels take her from New York to Nicaragua and finally back to California. There, she must reckon with the legacy of her father's love and failure and decide whether she'll let her past capsize her future-or if she can finally find balance with a life of her choosing.

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Reviews

"""Stewart is an imaginative writer and has developed a compelling cast of characters. . . . The settings are well developed . . . and the author makes every location, from a hippie Vermont boarding school to the dregs of 1970s student housing to downtown New York in the 1980s feel vivid and realistic. An ambitious family story with strong characters."" -Kirkus Reviews"

Author Information

"Sally Lee Stewart is a fourth-generation Californian and elementary education specialist. She lives on a cooperatively grazed ten-acre farm in the coastal hills of Northern California and sails on the San Francisco Bay. ""The Angle of Vanishing Stability"" is her first novel."

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