Remember This - Hardcover

Smith, Dinitia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080501036X ISBN 13: 9780805010367

Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 1989

Laura suspects that her father and her stepbrother Simon may have driven her mother to her death years ago, and when Simon finally reappears, her murky past finally begins to come into focus

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From Publishers Weekly:

This earnest tale of loss and recovery rises out of Manhattan writer Laura Fiske's recollections of her childhood. Laura was five, living in England where her father was in the Foreign Service, when her mother died. Soon after, her father married an English woman with a young son named Simon, to whom Laura, lonely and bereft, became closely attached--feelings that will form a paradigm of emotional connection for Laura as she matures. After her stepmother loses custody of Simon in a bitterly contested suit, Laura goes to live with her grandparents in the States, joining her father and his wife when they move to Virginia a few years later--there is no word of Simon. Through the years, Laura learns that her father and stepmother were having an affair before her mother died, and that her mother's knowledge of that relationship may have contributed to her death. As a young adult, gradually uncovering her anger at her father and stepmother, Laura realizes her own affair with a married man parallels their relationship. At this point, Simon, an ex-convict, reappears in her life, and Laura is able to examine--and act on--her feelings for him, finding release from the constraints of her past. Smith ( Hard Rain ) writes with passion and intensity, but her characters lack a comparable forcefulness, seeming more the subjects of a psychological study than participants in an absorbing story.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

This rewarding second novel provides a suspenseful, probing examination of a disintegrating family. Laura has never forgiven her father and stepmother for their betrayal of her mother and their desertion of her stepmother's son as a result of a scandalous divorce in post-World War II London. Now an adult in New York City, involved with a married man with a son, she is haunted by the past and by the mysterious appearance of her stepmother's son, now a disturbed adult. Smith unravels the complicated plot line withoutdescending to soap opera techniques. Despite the rather unappealing, self-centered characters and the rough transitions between episodes, this novel would be a worthwhile purchase for public libraries.
- Elizabeth Guiney Sandvick, North Hennepin Community Coll., Minneapolis
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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