Airs of Providence (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction),Used

Product Description Providencea city named in the hope that a direct compliment to God might place Him under some sort of obligation to its inhabitantsprovides Jean McGarry with the fertile ground of her comic and gritty, harsh and touching cycle of stories. Weaving in and out of Airs of Providence is a novella telling the story of April and Margery Flanaghan, two sisters trying to grow up in this neighborhood and doing only a soso job of it. And it is a job, in a world not clearly made for anyone, but better suited to an older generation. Surrounded by nuns and priests, uncles and aunts, biddies and oddballs, April and Margery do their best to be normal. They practice their penmanship, babysit, go to a prom, and try to be up to date. But how even to look normal in a world where you are always running up against uncontrollable mood swings, mysterious infirmities, unexplained sorrows? Over a period of thirtyfive years, they sniff out neighborhood scandals, get an "earful" of what the others are up to, and rest secure behind their sets of double curtains in the knowledge that everything human and frail is on the outside, everything blameless and perfect on the inside. If the Airs of Providence are sometimes rough, they are always funny. They may be sad too, but it is a dryeyed melancholy that is no relationor perhaps just a poor relationto the air of "Danny Boy." From Publishers Weekly An Irish Catholic neighborhood in the 1950s and '60s is the backdrop for these 15 stories (only one of which has been previously published), which treat the reader to some very credible slices of life. McGarry arranges her tales in such a way that every other one deals with the exploits of two sisters, Margery and April Flanaghan. The author makes it easy for readers to enter into the girls' lives as they struggle with the rites of passage of childhood and adolescence: trying to satisfy the demanding nuns at school, preparing for the prom, babysitting for the first time. And through it all the sisters must contend with their mother's sarcasm and their father's temper. The book's alternating stories introduce a variety of colorful individuals and round out McGarry's sometimes sad, sometimes amusing and always very real portrait of a workingclass neighborhood. November 8Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review "Praise for Jean McGarry:McGarry keenly depicts both workingclass and privileged cultures with deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits." New York Times"Jean McGarry's fictions invite you into their rooms as though you were a welcome and sympathetic relation... they trust language. They construct characters... They try, in Joseph Conrad's words, to make us see." Baltimore Sun"McGarry's thickly layered prose, with its stunning emotional accuracies, is always just on the verge of exploding into dream or fantasy, or, as in The Very Rich Hours, into delusions." Women's Review of Books"A gifted observer, records with fidelity the daily minutiae of life and introspection." Publishers Weekly About the Author Jean McGarry teaches at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in Baltimore, Maryland. Her previous books include Gallagher's Travels and The Very Rich Hours.