ISBN: 1860469760

[SR: 2938836], Paperback, [EAN: 9781860469763], Vintage, Vintage, Book, [PU: Vintage], Vintage, Because her black boyfriend Kamon Gilbert was killed in a city street before the birth of t… More...

[SR: 2938836], Paperback, [EAN: 9781860469763], Vintage, Vintage, Book, [PU: Vintage], Vintage, Because her black boyfriend Kamon Gilbert was killed in a city street before the birth of their child, Jenny Templin moved out of the city. Because she lived so far away, she bought a car, and because she had a car she took a job. Because she had a job she gave her boy to his black grandparents to care for most of the time. Because she worked so hard she liked to relax with a few drinks after work before she picked up the boy. And because she'd had too many drinks one night and because she was dead tired, her car spun on the road and rolled, leaving the boy orphaned at the age of three, with two sets of grandparents, one white and one black, each determined to raise the boy their own way. Told from various perspectives, and in language that soars, Make Believe is a brilliant, devastating, yet ultimately redemptive exploration of the ways in which human beings use imagination to build barriers against the random nature of existence., Joanna Scott, much lauded for her 1997 gothic, The Manikin, sloughs that novel's gloom for the less rarefied air of familial torment and interracial romance in Make Believe. A compact jostling of flashback, shifting angles and hallucinatory impression, her fifth novel is held together by four-year-old Bo, the object of a contentious custody battle after his teenage mother dies in an automobile accident. Through the boy's eyes we see the disorienting kaleidoscope of adult ambition and impotence, as those vying for him try to sort out not only his life, but their own.When volatile Jenny Templin falls for Kamon Gilbert, she imagines that bearing his child will win her both security and love. But Kamon--artistic, yearning and, much to the displeasure of Jenny's mother and stepfather, black--is killed while Jenny is pregnant, leaving her and the child alone with his sheltering, if overwhelmed, parents. The Gilberts, in turn, seem the obvious choice for guardianship once Bo is orphaned. Jenny's parents, however, struggling with shame and a latent covetousness, win custody of the spirited Bo, casting both families into degrees of disarray.Scott tells the story in deliberate, even tones, frequently cataloguing the broad and disparate panorama of Bo's horizon. What she uncovers is a world where no one is entirely devoid of selfish motivation, where love can be equal parts affection and, sadly, make-believe. --Ben Guterson, 590756, Contemporary Fiction, 62, Fiction, 1025612, Subjects, 266239, Books<

2002, ISBN: 9781860469763

Paperback, Nouveau livre, [PU: Vintage]

ISBN: 9781860469763

New. ., 6