A Trick of Nature (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
by Suzanne Matson
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Greg Goodman is a very ordinary guy--a not-very-ambitious school teacher and football coach who takes his attractive wife, Patty, their twin adolescent daughters, and the comfortable ease of their suburban routine for granted. Until lightening strikes--both literally and figuratively--as Greg runs a pattern with his junior varsity team during a muggy August practice and fifteen-year-old Timothy Phelps is directly struck. This crisis threatens to unravel all the strands anchoring Greg to his show more normal habits of being. When Timothy's mother, a stripper and addict who abandoned Timothy as a child, enters the mix, Greg discovers his own complicated and misguided longings. As in her debut novel, Suzanne Matson employs "crisp, clean writing . . . [and] compassionately drawn characters" (New York Times Book Review) to create a gripping story about the nature of love, trust, family, and marriage. Set in a seemingly safe world of split-levels and carefully tended lawns, A Trick of Nature powerfully captures the characters' emerging self-awareness as they are forced to test the assumptions they hold about themselves and the connections that bind them. show lessTags
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[A Trick of Nature] starts slowly and never picks up the pace. This book is certainly trite and predictable. At the end of 300+ pages, I asked myself, "So what"? It is the story of middle class suburbia, nothing more, nothing less. I kept waiting for the story to get better, but I was disappointed.
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11 Works 206 Members
Suzanne Matson teaches creative writing and literature at Boston College.
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