Book Description
For 11-year-old David Lear, there is nobody quite like his mother. She can be so caring, so warm and funny, but there are times when her drinking sweeps her away and her affection gives way to verbal abuse and sometimes even violence. As her moods grow darker and more intense, David tries several times to run away from home, before he is finally sent away to boarding school. At the beginning, it's an odd and unfamiliar place, an exclusive prep school in the New England hills, where the rules seem oppressive and hard for a boy to understand. David struggles to adjust and to find friends who will accept him despite the vestiges of an old physical handicap that still haunt him. With elegant prose and a deep and personal understanding of the story, award-winning poet Anthony S. Abbott offers us his debut novel, a coming-of-age odyssey that novelist Jill McCorkle calls "a beautiful story, a story of hope." As David slowly finds his footing at school, he must also contend with the legacy of his family. He sets out alone on a summertime journey in search of a father he hasn't seen in many years, a stepmother who loathes him, and a mysterious benefactress who pays for his schooling. Yet the most powerful and problematic character he must deal with is his mother, Maggie Hope, whose life has long since slipped from its moorings. For David, the question is whether something similar will happen to him or whether he will manage, as he becomes a young man, to overcome his family's history of tragedy and find the strength to make his way in the world.

About the Author
Anthony S. Abbott is a native of San Francisco who received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. The former chairman of the Department of English at Davidson College, he is the author of three books of poetry, The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat, A Small Thing Like a Breath, and The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World. This is his first novel. Abbott lives in Davidson, North Carolina.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For 11-year-old David Lear, there is nobody quite like his mother. She can be so caring, so warm and funny, but there are times when her drinking sweeps her away and her affection gives way to verbal abuse and sometimes even violence. As her moods grow darker and more intense, David tries several times to run away from home, before he is finally sent away to boarding school.

At the beginning, it's an odd and unfamiliar place, an exclusive prep school in the New England hills, where the rules seem oppressive and hard for a boy to understand. David struggles to adjust and to find friends who will accept him despite the vestiges of an old physical handicap that still haunt him.

With elegant prose and a deep and personal understanding of the story, award-winning poet Anthony S. Abbott offers us his debut novel, a coming-of-age odyssey that novelist Jill McCorkle calls "a beautiful story, a story of hope."

As David slowly finds his footing at school, he must also contend with the legacy of his family. He sets out alone on a summertime journey in search of a father he hasn't seen in many years, a stepmother who loathes him, and a mysterious benefactress who pays for his schooling. Yet the most powerful and problematic character he must deal with is his mother, Maggie Hope, whose life has long since slipped from its moorings.

For David, the question is whether something similar will happen to him or whether he will manage, as he becomes a young man, to overcome his family's history of tragedy and find the strength to make his way in the world.