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A Big Storm Knocked It Over

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

“Laurie Colwin’s beautiful final book, A Big Storm Knocked It Over, is funny and moving and rich with complicated happiness—a love story for anyone who tends to overthink things, a comic novel about trying to find a place in the world.” — Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

In her fifth and final novel, acclaimed author Laurie Colwin explores marriage and friendship, motherhood and careers, as experienced by a cast of delightfully idiosyncratic Manhattanites. At once a hilarious social commentary and an insightful, sophisticated modern romance, A Big Storm Knocked It Over stands as a living tribute to one of contemporary fiction’s most original and beloved voices.

In her late thirties, Jane Louise Parker has just married a man whose native decency leaves her almost breathless at her good fortune. After the wedding, she returns to work at a small and tony publishing house whose finances are in disarray. Alongside her best friend, Edie, Jane Louise patiently waits to become pregnant, wondering if a baby will provide a sense of rootedness that still seems to elude her. When that longed-for child arrives, it transforms the Parkers’ lives in a way that is as unexpected as it is rapturous.


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    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 30, 1993
      Reading Colwin's ( Goodbye Without Leaving ) posthumous novel is a bittersweet experience; delight in her irresistible characters and her sensitive probing of life's mysteries is tinged with regret that we will never again see the reflections of her wise and imaginative mind. This is Colwin's most mature novel, her most deeply felt (but characteristically light-fingered) domestic fairy tale for adults. Colwin's characters share a supersensitivity, and a wide-eyed wonder toward even mundane institutions and events. Here, late 30-ish book designer Jane Louise Parker, recently married to plant chemist Teddy, has difficulty thinking of herself as a grown-up. Jewish, dark and ``a nomad,'' she has a free-floating anxiety, born of a lifetime of feeling excluded. She feels inferior to focused Teddy, the scion of a WASP family with roots in a small community in the Berkshires. Not much actually happens in this book: Jane Louise fends off the advances of her libidinous boss; she and her best friend, caterer and pastry chef Edie, become pregnant, and have babies. Motherhood provides Jane Louise with a new source of anxiety, but that is dispelled, temporarily at least, by her realization that her daughter Miranda will have roots and a secure identity. Meanwhile, Colwin examines some traditional institutions with a laser-sharp eye and an offbeat sense of humor. She speculates about marriage and families and friendships, about differences between the sexes, and about such existential questions as ``Were other people ever, ever knowable?'' All of this is expressed in witty, accurate dialogue and graceful prose, and with inimitable charm.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 30, 1994
      An enchanting novel about motherhood and marriage by the late author of Happy All the Time .

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Languages

  • English

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