Fugitive Blue - Hardcover

Shapiro ( Playing with Fire ) explores artistic motivations, selfishness and interdependence in this dark and lushly told tale. Her title refers to the Prussian blue paint favored by Picasso during his blue period, called "fugitive" because it eventually bleeds into and taints the colors around it. More broadly, the title hints at narrator Joanna Hirsch's sense of herself--she says that her months in the womb were "the only time my mother felt that my existence was not erasing hers as surely as if my presence were a noxious, fugitive blue." Flashbacks reveal that when Joanna was 12, her mother fled their New Jersey home for a SoHo loft, forsaking the responsibilities of parenthood for greater freedom to pursue her art. Now 32 and an Off-Broadway actress, Joanna still craves her world-famous mother's acknowledgment, and she realizes that a similar dynamic of abandonment has shaped her relationships with men. Shapiro's resonant and complex storytelling earns the reader's full attention, as Joanna reassembles the shards of a broken mirror until at last it reflects a complete, if fragmented, portrait. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The day before Joanna starts seventh grade, two things happen: her mother, Georgia Higgens Hirsch, leaves home to become a world-famous sculptor, and she meets Billy Overmeyer, a beautiful, sensitive boy who will become her best friend and, like her mother, an unattainable love of her life. Joanna, now 32 and a talented actress, recounts these events in a prose that is lyrical yet painfully honest. She remembers her father's sorrow and eventual second marriage to Billy's mother; her alcoholic liaison with Nigel, an aspiring director who leaves on the heels of her first success; and Billy's fatal beating before her eyes in Central Park. Always at the core is Joanna's aching need for her mother, a need that is finally realized when Georgia, who always claimed she needed no one, reaches out to her daughter for healing and love. An absorbing novel of complex relationships and basic needs. Highly recommended. BOMC selection.
- Donna L. Schulman, Cornell Univ. Libs., New York
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.