I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas - Hardcover

YA-- Another example of Gilchrist's remarkable ability to create a complex character who stamps her unforgettable persona onto readers. Rhoda is a precocious, intellectual young woman who has just completed her freshman year at Vanderbilt. A southern daddy's girl with an Electra complex, she is constantly protected from want by her family's wealth and power, while she repeatedly rejects their efforts to protect her, cover up her mistakes, and even raise her children when she abdicates this duty. Through Gilchrist's skillful portrait of this insecure, yet enigmatic and fascinating woman, readers understand what it is to repeat destructive patterns because of a basic need to be loved. This need becomes a strangling obsession and an endless cycle of alcoholic binges that bring her to the brink of disaster. Readers will want Rhoda to shake loose her demons, while they know she will not. Although the book deals with subjects that require maturity, adolescents can learn a great deal about family relationships. A sobering and absorbing look at self-destructive behavior that comes from an unhealthy dependency on others and an inability to take responsibility for one's actions.
- Barbette Timperlake, R.E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gilchrist ( Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle ) brings back familiar characters in three linked, deeply perceptive novellas focusing on the Hand family of Charlotte, N.C. In "Winter" famed novelist Anna Hand, ill with cancer, gives her last energies to save her adored young niece Jessie from her neurotic mother, Sheila, taking a dangerous journey to Turkey to secure proof that Sheila is an unfit parent. In "De Havilland Hand," Anna's other niece surfaces, the headstrong half-Cherokee Olivia, child of Daniel Hand's idyllic hippie-period marriage to the now dead Summer Deer. Both Jessie and Olivia confront their baffled father, aging Daniel, and learn to coexist. "A Summer in Maine" gathers a houseful of kinfolk and close acquaintances to recover Anna's literary papers. Instead they carry on their "junky troubled life" of lovemaking and wrangling, in a welter of voices, the most humane being that of the black servant Traceleen. Gilchrist brilliantly captures the intimate accents and rhythms of a family under stress.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.