From the cover:
Ann Packer’s debut novel The Dive from Clausen’s Pier was a nationwide best seller that established her as one of our most gifted chroniclers of the interior lives of women. Now, in her long-awaited second novel, she takes us on a journey into a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point. Expertly, with the keen introspection and psychological nuance that are her hallmarks, she explores what happens when there are inequities between friends, and when the hard won balances of a long relationship are disturbed, perhaps irreparably, by a harrowing crisis.
Liz and Sarabeth were childhood neighbors in the suburbs of northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed—through Liz’s marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth’s attempts to make a happy life for herself despite the shadow cast by her mother’s act—their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength. But when Liz’s adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters that threaten to engulf the family, the fault lines in the women’s friendship are revealed, and both Liz and Sarabeth are forced to reexamine their most deeply held beliefs about their connection. Songs Without Words is about the sometimes confining roles we take on in our closest relationships, about the familial myths that shape us both as children and as parents, and about the limits—and the power—of the friendships we create when we are young.
Once again, Ann Packer has written a novel of singular force and complexity: thoughtful, moving, and absolutely gripping, it more than confirms her prodigious literary gifts.
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Reviews
“Engrossing, forgiving and quietly wise, Songs never makes a false step as Packer keeps both the pages and her readers’ minds turning until the very end.”
—People
“The extraordinary authority of Packer’s voice lies in her refusal to make heroes of the victims of mischance or villains out of the friends, lovers and family members who sometimes fail them.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Subtle and complex...a compelling family drama about friendship, the past, guilt and unconscious patterns set in childhood. What’s most impressive about Songs is Packer’s ability to set a story in the wealthy and beautiful suburbs of San Francisco and make her characters’ suffering authentic....Packer makes us understand why life is simply harder for some people.”
—USA Today
“Packer writes about adult female friendship with a nuanced understanding of its emotional intensity.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“She writes easily, like walking or breathing, pinpointing emotional truths without drawing attention to her skill. You are rarely aware of her, even as you become intimate with her characters. Even as those characters feel things they, and you, have never been able to articulate....Packer has an unnerving ability to gaze steadily at feelings you can barely acknowledge even to yourself: self-pity in the midst of catastrophe...the sensual power of a mother’s love for her son. She interprets the subtle moves of Liz and Brody’s marriage with breathtaking clarity....These are secret universals, things widely felt but never mentioned....You are grateful for Packer’s insight, refreshed and comforted by the depth of her empathy.”
—Newsday
“It’s easy to find elements of one’s own experiences in Packer’s wise prose, which proves her an expert observer of the give-and-take that characterizes any deep friendship.”
—Washington Post
“As in The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, Packer makes the ripples from one act so involving, you can’t pull away.”
—Good Housekeeping
“Readers will be pleased to find Packer’s remarkable talent for characterization in the pages of her second novel.... Commonplace events and everyday gestures reveal not only sorrow, but the complex, interior lives of characters....[The teenager] Lauren’s sections are pitch-perfect....It is Lauren who gives this novel its enormous heart.”
—Charlotte Observer