Roberta Parry is a painter and that skill shows itself in her writing. She paints her locale and you see it in brilliant colors and waves of heat and natural splendor.

First light comes as a soft gray, suffusing into the night like a gentle tide, pushing back moon and stars. The gray gradually diffuses into a wash of translucent sea green, which flows into a wash of shimmering lemon yellow. The silhouetted mountains blend from deep indigo to pale cerulean to vibrant lavender. A flush of peach announces the imminence of the sun, which suddenly cuts above the now-mauve mountains in a fiery slice of orange. The violet and blue streaks of the desert flee before the wave of fire, to hide beneath scrub and rocks as cobalt shadows.

It is liking watching a watercolor creation come into being and you feel the magnificence and see it.

She knows the area she writes about intimately, intimately enough to weave the customs and beliefs of the Hopi Indians into the story in a fascinating way that informs and teaches but makes perfect sense to the story line and never intrudes. Some of my favorite passages in the book are those devoted to the Hopi dances and rituals and one of the most moving is related to an Indian ritual involving eagles. I literally had to close the book and sit with the information, digesting it, before I could move on.

As to plot, Reggie Patterson Kendall is a thirty-five year old who is still lost in her past, tethered to her high school experiences and unable to let go of her first love. She is married with two children, but she is incapable of being happy with her life and she spends far too much of her energy speculating on where she might be if she had not lost the boy she thinks of as the “love of her life.” When we meet her, she has finally reached that wall that must either be climbed over or will forever hold her in, apart from the people who are present in her life and the joys she might have. The book bounces us between the struggling woman and the girl she was and introduces us to a cast of characters who shaped the fifteen year old Reggie.

Less than half way through the book, Reggie observes, ”But it wasn’t a closeness of convex curve melding into concave curve, complements. Theirs was a closeness of friction that produced sparks and heat. They kept abrading against one another, trying to find the need in the one the other might meet. Reggie adjusted herself to make the fit.” This seemed to me to be a theme in Reggie, she was always trying to fit herself into someone else’s mode and when it didn’t work (as it never does), she abraded against everyone in her life.

This is Reggie’s emotional growth story, but it contains some mystery. It is obvious something more happened in Reggie’s past than we are privy to at the beginning and the desire to unearth the key to that mystery keeps you reading and wanting solutions and greater understanding. I think this novel would have great appeal for a woman of a certain age, one who is still grappling with her own identity, how she fits into the world she occupies, and how to be an individual while still being a wife, a mother, a daughter and a lover.

Parry writes in a quick, staccato style when she deals in conversational episodes, interspersing the words with thoughts (which is how all of us really talk to other people, thinking of what we just said, what we would like to say but can’t, watching reactions and wishing we could call words back even as they leave our mouths). I liked this. It made the conversations believable and wove them into the fabric without breaking the action.

One thing I cannot close without saying, is that the book contains some sexual content that is fairly graphic and, for me, a little uncomfortable. I did not feel that it always drove the story or was necessary for the understanding of the characters. Please remember that I am a big fan of 19th Century literature, where sexual contact is always more implied than exhibited. I imagine most of us have had sex and know what goes on between two people in the heat of passion. I prefer something left to the imagination. For those who like some fire and steam in their reading, I believe Roberta Parry knows how to write these scenes well.

My thanks to Roberta Parry for the opportunity to read and review this novel.
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