Falling to Earth: A Novel - Hardcover

Brownrigg, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1563411016 ISBN 13: 9781563411014

Publisher: Firebrand Books

Synopsis

Alice - computer honcho and closeted dyke by day/swimmer in the lesbian sea of women by night - has been touched by an angel, but not the television variety. Phoebe is a different kind of angel in America, Alice's insolent guardian angel. And she wants to be human.

About this title

Review:

Alice once dreamed of being an artist, but instead became a hard-working and successful manager at a computer-software company, supervising a group of over-educated writers who have decided, like her, to make money rather than do what they love. Her insistence on keeping her work life rigidly separate from her private life means that her private life barely exists. Lovers are sacrifice; needs are deferred. Her lesbian life, she thought, had a "Brigadoon-like quality, a fantasy world that was really nice to visit, but impossible to live in." Only the world of work was "real." What will happen when Alice's red-haired guardian angel, Phoebe, starts visiting her at work, spinning out tales that beg to be written down, and seducing the strait-laced Alice with thoughts of another world entirely? Elizabeth Brownrigg's first novel is absorbing and well written, a series of stories within stories, reminiscent, at times, of early Jeanette Winterson. --Regina Marler

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From Chapter 1:

This is a story about doppelgangers and angels and the difference between heaven and hell.

The story begins at a cabin in the Blue Ridge. I lived in the city, but I went up to the mountains for a couple of weeks every summer to swim and fish and read long, bad novels that I would be embarrassed to be seen with down in the valley.

On an August day around noon, I put on my bathing suit and followed the path down to the river. I walked into the water up to my chest. The river was only slightly cooler than the hot summer air around it. I leaned back and floated in the still water. There was something on a sycamore branch far above my head. I was staring at whatever it was upside down, so I paddled myself around to get a better look. It was a woman with red hair who was wearing a white nightgown. She had wings.

"Jesus Christ!" I floundered to my feet.

"Not quite," she said.

"Who the hell are you?"

"You remember me."

I stood in the chest-high water and gawked.

"You owe me," she said.

"What?

"You gave me your soul."

"What?"

"A bargain is a bargain," she said.

I decided to stop saying what. The figure in the tree crossed her arms and waited for me to say something new. I caught at the faint wisps of a memory.

When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend whose name was Pinky. I also had a guardian angel named Phoebe, who was different from Pinky because Phoebe was real and Pinky was only imaginary. I told my best friend Robin about Pinky, but I didn't tell her about Phoebe. Robin didn't really have an imaginary friend, but she pretended to. I remembered an afternoon when Pinky and Robin and I played in the hot sun of the backyard while Phoebe watched from under the dogwood. Phoebe had red hair and she wore a white nightgown. Her wings moved slowly back and forth in the heat as she cooled herself, like a butterfly. Robin and I were spinning hula hoops in wild gyrations around our hips. The hula hoops went down, down, until they slipped past our ankles and fluttered to rest. We fell on the wet grass, laughing, grey insects popping up around us. Then we practiced our somersaults until we were dizzy and the sky spun like a hula hoop above our heads. I told Robin she was my very best friend in the whole wide world. Phoebe smiled at me from underneath the dogwood tree. I liked my guardian angel much better than I liked Jesus and God His Father and the Holy Spirit, who was an expressionless bird. The Holy Spirit was sinister. God looked angry. He was also always watching me, just like my parents. I didn't think it was Eve's fault that Adam was a liar. I couldn't understand why snakes were supposed to be bad, and why the statue of Mary in the corner of the church was stepping on one. The guardian angel was the friendliest person in heaven. The rest of them would turn on you the minute you made a mistake.

In confession, I said the same thing every time: "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I had bad thoughts about my sister." I wished my guardian angel would do a bit more about protecting me from my big sister, who thought she was God and should watch everything I did. I wished Phoebe would stab her or make her go blind, but apparently guardian angels weren't supposed to do things like that. This seemed like poor planning to me. If Phoebe would just get rid of my sister, she wouldn't have to protect me from her any more.

When Robin and I finished playing, she went back home and Pinky walked alongside me into the house. I forgot about Pinky as I walked through the kitchen, so she disappeared. Phoebe hovered right outside the window. I went upstairs, and she flew into my bedroom window. She sat in the rocking chair in the corner. I settled down onto my bed with The Golden Book of Beetles. Beetles came in all different colors and sizes and shapes and my sister hated them, which was another point in their favor. "Look, Phoebe," I said, and I showed her a picture of a rhinoceros beetle. Phoebe looked at the beetle and nodded. Outside my bedroom window, in the trees, the cicadas buzzed. Their translucent brown shells were stuck to the bark of the dogwood tree in our yard. I thought they returned to their shells at night, because my father told me, "That's the cicada's house." I played a trick on the cicadas by moving their houses so they wouldn't be able to find them when they were through buzzing for the day and wanted to go to sleep.

"I remember you," I said to Phoebe up in her sycamore tree.

About this edition

• Publisher: Firebrand Books
• ISBN 10: 1563411016
• ISBN 13: 9781563411014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 174