Reeling Through Life

Tara Ison's Reeling Through Life is the most enjoyable, intelligent, sharp-eyed, and intensely personal account I've ever read of how movies help to make us who we are. It's as stirring as Norma Rae's union sign, as seductive as Mrs. Robinson's leopard-skin coat. -- Matthew Goodman, bestselling author of Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World Tara Ison's passion for the movies shines in every essay in Reeling Through Life, as she gleans life lessons from the movies she's fallen in love with. By turns hilarious, poignant, and outrageous; always profound and beautifully written. --Hallie Ephron, author of Night Night, Sleep Tight Praise for Rockaway How tragic that this book --set in a Queens, New York, beach town that in real life was devastated by Sandy --has a new relevance. Sarah is a California painter who's come east for a retreat she hopes will revive her artistic passion. It's a sheer joy to stay in the company of Ison's voice. There's an unlikely relationship at the center, the kind of encounter that could happen only in the summertime suspension of 'ordinary' life. --Karen Russell, O Magazine In Ison's poetic depiction, Rockaway is equal parts tourist trap and salt-sprayed idyll, where beachgoers frolic in the shadow of some potent dramatic irony: the reader's awareness of the devastation soon to arrive across the river makes for an unsettling countdown...Ison possesses a surfeit of wit and an especial knack for upending love story conventions...as the narrative swirls to a stylish and startling end. -- The New York Times Book Review Here is a young woman at the end of her leash, the end of her youth, the edge of her art, not doing a melancholy artist-on-the-beach thing, but confronting the many true colors of her life in this beautiful and dangerous season. Tara Ison's Rockaway is a stirring, fresh look at a tough passage. --Ron Carlson, Return to Oak Pi