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Kate Braverman has published three novels including Palm Latitudes and Wonders of the West, four books of poetry and a collection of stories, one of which one her an O. Henry Award in 1992. Her new book, The Incantation of Frida K., will be available soon from Turnaround. Rick Moody is the award-winning author of Purple America and The Ice Storm - now a major motion picture starring Christina Ricci, Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver and Elijah Wood.
This is a re-issue of Kate Braverman's powerful and poetic exploration of drug addiction and the ties that bind dysfunctional families. The narrator is a young American woman in her late 20s who is forced to re-evaluate her life, and her closest relationships, when her elderly father has a recurrence of cancer and loses his will to live. Although her father's illness is the catalyst, it is not so much her relationship with him, but that with her mother, Francine, that is at the centre of the narrator's thoughts. The frequent tension between mother and daughter is heightened by the fact that Francine is a damaged person due to her family's troubled history, and our narrator is a drug addict whose existence revolves around her mother, and Jason, her egotistical lover, who introduced her to shooting up with cocaine. Everything is stained by the narrator's drug habit. The story reads like a dream as it drifts back and forth in time, repeating events and feelings in a spiral. Braverman's poetic language is darkly beautiful, yet she never falls into the trap of romanticizing drugs. She does not spare us the narrator's self-indulgence, her self-pity, her own compliance in being used, in taking on the role of a victim. But she does not leave the reader with a totally pessimistic view of life and human nature. Her world also incorporates love and hope, even though one finishes the novel with little faith in the narrator's ability to kick the habit. (Kirkus UK)
