The Moonlight Man - Softcover

A new Paula Fox novel is always a cause for celebrationshe is one of America's most talented writers. Her past books for young adults (One-Eyed Cat, The Slave Dancer, A Place Apart, et al.) have won her numerous awards, including the Newbery Medal, and her latest ranks as one of the best she's ever written. Looking forward to spending the summer with the father she barely knows, 15-year-old Catherine is left to wait for three long weeks at her Montreal boarding school, with no word from him to explain his absence. Finally he calls, and she meets him in Nova Scotia, beginning an extraordinary summer. Harry Ames is elegant, poetic, mysterious, quixotica complex figure Catherine "studies like a book." Her parents were divorced when she was three; she wants to see what it was in her father that her mother once loved. It wasn't his drinkingHarry goes on binges that horrify and repulse Catherine; it wasn't his facile ability to lie; it wasn't the way "he thrived on chaos." But she learns that he takes nothing in life for granted; he challenges her to examine her perceptions and actions carefully. Fox's subtle use of language and unique storytelling gifts create a world so complete and so rich that the reader hates to leave it. At one point, Catherine reflects that her father "seemed about to lead her into a dance to music she had never heard." This story, too, is music as we only rarely hear it.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grade 6-10 Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships through carefully chosen incident and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition through the vicissitudes of her characters. In this case, 15-year-old Catherine Ames vacations in a cottage in Nova Scotia with a father whom she barely knowsa failed writer with a poet's philosophical tongue who is an alcoholic. A competent child/woman, Catherine, in a few days of trying to understand and cope, lives through the classic kaleidoscope of responses of family members to alcoholics: denial, anger, fear, loneliness, exhaustion, disgust, pity, grief, sympathy. Harry Ames binges, blames, makes unreasonable demands, apologizes, reforms, relapses. Catherine succeeds in admiring her father for his talents while deploring his behavior, strengthened by knowing that their time together will end soon. And end it does, in apparent friendship, yet Harry Ames' last words to his daughter suggest that he will not see her again. There's enough detail and incident about alcoholism here for a case study, but the story rises above the clinical in poignantly dramatizing the separation that differing life patterns can inflict on those who love one another. Joanna Rudge Long, New York Public Library
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.