From Publishers Weekly
Richmond's sophomore novel (after The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress) is a bleak melodrama about a young woman's prolonged grief over the death of her best friend and former lover. Twelve years have passed since college student Amanda Ruth was brutally murdered, and her sidekick Jenny has yet to recover. Jenny and her estranged husband, Dave, take a cruise on the Yangtze to scatter Amanda Ruth's ashes in the homeland of Amanda's Chinese father. Although Jenny wants to save her marriage, she rather coolly trashes it by becoming intimate with Graham, a cruise passenger who, despite suffering the final throes of Lou Gehrig's disease, manages to show Jenny around and teach her about the environmental perils facing China. Jenny's relationship with Graham takes a dark-and implausible-turn when she learns of his wish to commit suicide. Through it all, she continually relives her friendship and adolescent romance with Amanda Ruth. Her obsession with the young woman leads her to engage in troubling behavior, propelling the plot into a moral wasteland where the environment becomes the object of desire and human life is casually snuffed out. Richmond's prose tends to run purple, especially during Jenny's brooding monologues, which dominate the book ("I gaze into the dark depths of the river, looking for some reflection of the woman I am now.... But the river is opaque, and my vision is blurred"). Though Richmond poses provocative questions about grief and desire, the shallow characters and sensational plot twists don't allow her to explore them in much depth.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From
Jenny has embarked on a mission up the Yangtze River--to scatter the ashes of her best friend, who was murdered 12 years earlier. The depth and nature of their friendship continues to occupy her thoughts and actions despite the passage of time. She has compelled her husband, David, to accompany her even though they've separated--his choice not hers. Their chance encounters, David's with a recovering drug user, Jenny's with an Australian with a grisly agenda, create an unusual four-part relationship as appropriate as it is peculiar. The amazing Chinese landscape and the pending dramatic changes to be wrought by the Three Gorges Dam are a fitting mirror for the lives of these in-transition characters. Richmond combines more story elements than it seems possible to fit into such a small debut novel. Issues of love, loyalty, prejudice, history, passion, and compassion elbow each other for space on each page. But even with its crowded feeling, the book is finely crafted and compelling, and its emotions resonate true and clear. Danise Hoover
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