House Under Snow Paperback - 2003

Summary

First line

The day my sister Ruthie left home, in 1973, my mother was upstairs in her bedroom in front of her vanity with a cutout of a model's face from Vogue pinned to the oval-shaped mirror, experimenting with her eye makeup in an attempt to replicate the exact fusion of eye shadow, lipstick, and eyebrow shape.

From the rear cover

"A lucid, finely crafted first novel . . .Captures the purity and desperation of adolescent love in thick, sensual descriptions tinged by the wisdom of distance." -Los Angeles Times
In this poignant and sensual story, Anna Crane, a woman soon to be married, reflects on her Ohio childhood during the 1960s and '70s. She recalls life with her two sisters and their charismatic mother, who is consumed by memories of her late husband. When Anna falls in love with the wild Austin Cooper, she finds herself caught between family loyalty and her own young passions. As she struggles to assert her independence and adulthood, she and her sisters begin to understand how their mother's failure to let go of the past threatens the future of the family.
Illuminating the price of loss and survival, House Under Snow is a brilliantly told tale of first love, of a family's slow disintegration, and of the enduring power of the past.
"Artful . . . A quiet stepsister to Rick Moody's The Ice Storm."-The New York Times Book Review
"An elegiac novel of a father's sudden death and its lingering effect on the family he leaves behind." -The Washington Post
Jill Bialosky received an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University, as well as an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of two books of poetry, The End of Desire and Subterranean, and her poems and essays appear regularly in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review and The Nation. She lives in New York with her husband and son.

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