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Home Schooling: Stories

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Overview

"Home Schooling is a collection of beautiful, haunting stories--intelligent, heartfelt, and true." --Alice Hoffman, author of The Third Angel

"Carol Windley's writing has a unique power, a perfect combination of delicacy, intensity, and fearless imagination." --Alice Munro

Home Schooling--a mesmerizing collection in which "each story . . . is denser and more alive than many novels" (The Vancouver Sun)--marks the American debut of a mature, masterful storyteller who has won several major awards in her native Canada and been nominated for the Giller Prize. Set against the moody landscape of Vancouver Island and the thrumming cities of the Pacific Northwest, the stories in Home Schooling uncover the hidden freight of families: in the title story, two sisters contend with their idealistic father's sudden inability to provide for their family, and their own separate attraction to the same boy; in "What Saffi Knows," a woman, now a mother herself, returns to a moment in her past when she held the knowledge that might have saved another child, but not the language with which to convey it; and in "Family in Black," a young woman finds the contours of her world permanently changed when her mother suddenly abandons her father for a man who embodies everything her mother taught her to despise. In these stories, families dissolve and reform in new and startling configurations: ghosts appear, the past intrudes and overwhelms the present, familiar terrain takes on a hostile aspect, and happiness often depends on unlikely alliances. With the invisibly perfect craftsmanship of Alice Munro, and the flesh-andblood sense of place of Annie Proulx, Carol Windley carves out territory all her own in these stories, each one a richly imagined and generous world that will stay with the reader for a long time.

Editorial Reviews

Peopled by a handful of vulnerable yet resilient creative types, among them poets, musicians, teachers and artists, Canadian author Windley's accomplished story collection focuses on the domestic scene, examining how family, lovers and neighbors leave their indelible marks. Mostly centered on or near Vancouver Island, Windley's cagey moments of conflict deftly illuminate her narrators' capacity for both pettiness and grace. In The Joy of Life, Alex finds herself living in the shadow of her best friend Dsire's idyllic life, but chances picking up the pieces when Dsire begins drifting from her husband and child. Felt Skies features a woman looking back on her connections with her strict mother and with her first adult lover, a much older man. Marisa of Children's Games moves into her lover's house and struggles to relate to his disagreeable, unpredictable son. Despite an abundance of similarly middle-class, introverted female characters, Windley keeps readers' attention with a fast pace and an eye for fresh details that make her efficient, achingly human dramas absorbing and sympathetic. (Feb.)
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Author Information

Bio of Carol Windley

Carol Windley has published two previous works of fiction in Canada: Visible Light, a story collection, and Breathing Under Water, a novel. She has won several major Canadian literary awards.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated

Filesize

1010.91 KB

Number of Pages

224

eBook ISBN

9781555849146

Excerpt from: Home Schooling by Carol Windley

In December Lydia went home. She took the bus out to Horseshoe Bay, where she walked onto the ferry. There was a storm. The sky was black. A woman with three small children came and sat on the bench facing her. The two smaller children kept crying, or grizzling, as Lydia's grandmother would have said, and their mother, who had long curly hair and very large pale eyes, tried to mollify them with cans of pop and gummy bears. The oldest, a little girl of about five, planted herself in front of Lydia, keeping her balance in spite of the ship's fractiousness. She was wearing patent leather shoes with ankle straps, and a short, flared skirt, like a figure skater. She looked like her mother, but with small, shrewd eyes. She began a long unvoiced indictment of Lydia's primary failings, admittedly legion: her introversion, her possessiveness, which concealed a gaping maw of insecurity, her willingness to live exclusively in the milieu of disgruntled dreams. Lydia knew the little girl wasn't real. She was a vision, a device of the gods, put on earth to destroy the last shreds of Lydia's self-esteem.

The ship juddered and veered sideways. Navigation in a storm. What could be more invigorating, more receptive to risk? The little girl showed off for Lydia, standing on one leg, arms out. Lydia prayed for shipwreck. She wanted to grab the little girl's tatty unwashed hair and drag her down with her, down into the cold, uncharted recesses of the Georgia Strait.