| Description: |
|
Product Description
Profiled in Interview magazine as a rising literary light even as she was launching an acting career in films by David Lynch and Woody Allen, twenty-eight-year-old Galaxy Craze now delivers a beguiling debut novel, By the Shore. A crystalline capturing of a modern romance and a young girl's coming-of-age on the British seaside. By the Shore introduces the world of twelve-year-old May, who lives in a less than thriving oceanfront bed-and-breakfast run by her single mother. May's life is filled with the frustrations and promise of youth, complicated by a loving if distracted young mother who strives to care for her two children without forfeiting her own fun and passion. In clear and sparkling prose, By the Shore captures that fragile, bittersweet world of youth on the cusp of adulthood.
Amazon.com Review
Twelve is a dreadful age for almost any girl, with its nonstop insecurity and humiliation. But May, the heroine of Galaxy Craze's By the Shore, seems to suffer considerably more than her share of unhappiness. Ignored by the popular clique at school, dressed by her mother in retro-hippie fashions that are anything but cool, she's a virtual poster child for preteen angst. And if adolescence weren't enough of a burden, May must also contend with a big dose of familial angst. Her mother, Lucy, runs a none-too-successful guesthouse on the English coast. Young and single, she spends more time gossiping and party hopping than tending to May and her brother Eden. And this distracted maternal style has, alas, exposed our heroine to machinations of grown-up life, which she tracks with fascination and horror. Her single remaining pocket of naiveté involves her estranged father, whose return she eagerly anticipates--even after an unassuming writer begins to pay court to her swinging mom. But this dream, too, is crushed when the genuine item shows up: "This is what happens to hope: it gets smaller and smaller." By the Shore does contain some of the typical properties of a coming-of-age drama. But Craze, a first-time novelist and actress, writes with acute insight and sympathy, and she understands one of the great consolations of adolescence: that even the tiniest kernel of hope can be enough to generate almost boundless happiness. --Brangien Davis
|
