Bøker av Patricia Averbach

Dreams of Drowning is a work of magical realism that moves between real time where lives are buffeted by political conflict, tragedy and loss and another mysterious time where pain is healed, and love is eternal.It's 1973 and Amy, an American ex-pat, is living as an illegal immigrant in Toronto where she's fled to escape the scandal surrounding her twin sister's death by drowning. Joanie's been gone two years, but Amy still hears her cries for help. Romance would jeopardize the secrets Amy has to keep, but when she meets Arcus, a graduate student working to restore democracy in Greece, she falls hard. Arcus doesn't know about Amy's past, and she doesn't know Arcus has secrets of his own, including the shady history of an ancient relic he uses as a paperweight. In 1993 Toronto, Jacob Kanter, a retired archaeologist, is mourning his dear wife and grappling with his son's plans to move him to a nursing home. Despite double vision, tremors, and cognitive impairment, he remembers sailing as a youth and sets out toward the lake where he boards a ferry boat embarking on its maiden voyage. He expects a short harbor cruise, but the Aqua Meridian is larger than it looks, and time is slippery on the water. When he hears a drowning woman call for help his story merges with Amy's, and they discover they have unexpected gifts for one another.

When middle-aged Martin Berman invests in a bad real estate deal, the family loses its upscale home in Shaker Heights Ohio and its savings, including college tuition funds for the kids, Lauren and Elliot. What cascades out of such a loss? A novel’s worth of disasters and adventures, rejections and new meetings, growth and regrowth. A novel’s worth of insights into human choices, coping strategies, ways of valuing and judging. A novel’s worth of deftly deployed symbols, achingly exact descriptions, subtle observations. Averbach presents protagonist Deena Berman’s reactions with wit and empathy, slowly introducing an impressive range of characters. A college librarian, Deena packs up the house which she’s seen as proof of her family’s stability and success; as she sorts and  recycles, she finds her decades-old college application essay. It tells a moving story about how her own mother had rejected an affluent family, become a hippie, moved west and renamed herself "Rain"-- and how Deena had beenraised in a primitive little commune called New Moon until, at age 14, she’d run away from her two moms and moved in with her stiff and proper Jewish grandmother. No longer called Harmony, she’d reinvented herself as Deena and never looked back.She rips the paper into tiny pieces, but this "college essay" keeps readers anchored, wondering about whether a mother named Rain might somehow be resurrected. As the present-day plot evolves and devolves, Averbach follows through with exquisitely crafted episodes, deftly drawn drawn characters--some as complex as the talented Hungarian photographer who costs Deena her job, some as surprisingly individualized as the tattooed landlord who kicks her out of her apartment in Sarasota. Resurrecting Rain does full and realistic justice to the angry son who refuses to communicate, the lively daughter who morphs into a blue-haired freegan with a cell phone but no forwarding address, and the thoroughly depressed husband, glued to the television set. Readers feel viscerally the temptations, panics, pleasures, shames, and hopes which follow the loss of a privileged lifestyle.In the middle of her long spiral down toward homelessness, Deena encounters an elderly woman, an idiosyncratic—what? bag lady?--who feeds and carries on salty conversations with crows. Raisa Goetz, like Deena’s grandmother, had lost most of her family in the Holocaust. But Raisa’s growth process has been very different from Bubbe’s. Just ask the crows. And if Patricia Averbach happens to end her novel with a New Moon celebration—well, are we really cynical enough to begrudge the very human characters she’s created their moment in the moonlight?