Forms of Water

ANNOTATION

At the age of 80, Brendan Auberon has one wish: to see his 200 acres of wooded ridge overlooking what was Paradise Valley before the villages were drowned to provide water for Boston. When he tricks his nephew into highjacking the nursing home van and taking him there, Brendan's family thinks he's been kidnapped.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Nursing homebound Brendan Auberon has one last wish: to see his two hundred acres overlooking what used to be Paradise Valley, before the villages were drowned to provide water for the city of Boston. When Brendan dupes his nephew into hijacking the nursing home van for the journey, what begins as a lark becomes an adventure infinitely more complex.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A troubled family is reunited during a journey to an aging uncle's Massachusetts home. (Aug.)

Library Journal

After spending his productive years in a monastery near his childhood home, 80-year-old Brendan Auberon is now confined to a wheelchair and a nursing home, where his family pay him occasional obligatory visits. When Brendan convinces his nephew Henry to help him return to the home of his youth, now covered by a reservoir supplying water to the city of Boston, Brendan steals the nursing home van for the adventure. The trip doesn't turn out as planned, but with Brendan and Henry on the run, and various family members in pursuit, it is anything but dull; Brendan, through his last capricious act, serves as the catalyst to set errant family members on the right path again. Barrett ( The Middle Kingdom , LJ 2/1/91) combines family dissension and adventure with healthy doses of faith and optimism. The result is a satisfying analysis of family dysfunction in the spirit of Sue Miller.-- Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.

Jennifer Howard

If any group of mortals knows how it feels to be expelled from paradise, it's the Auberon clan, the appealingly wretched family in Andrea Barrett's fourth novel....Ms. Barrett nicely details the quiet agonies of people who have fallen from grace through bad luck and worse judgment, and suggests that if you can't regain paradise, you can at least make peace with its loss. -- New York Times

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"Intelligent and elegiac...a winning novel." — Pinckney Benedict

"Something about Andrea Barrett's writing, her honesty, her patience with -- and wyre compassion for -- her characters makes one wish that more novels were as engaging or just as well as well-written as The Forms of Water." — Francine Prose