The tempest of Clemenza

This dark, brilliant, aching, astonishingly unsentimental story within a tale within a mystery is haunted by impending doom. Clemenza's mother writes this story in tribute to the child she has lost. Her challenge is to write without sentimentality and without the dishonesty of romance, even while she acknowledges that sentiment and romance are important to young girls.

This mother, whose own life has been wounded by malevolent men, wants to allow her child her dreamy hopes without seeing them abused by a world of masculine violence. A storm-tossed lake in Vermont, Shakespeare, academic word bullies in an Australian university, James Joyce, a mysterious van, a kidnapping, a lost manuscript, each thread weaves with the next, tighter and tighter in this highly intelligent and unsettling novel.