Thief
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Suzanne believes she knows who she is: a former wild child, neither virgin nor virginal as a teen; someone who pulls for the wayward girls and troubled boys she now teaches in Minnesota. She has learned to survive good love and bad love and people who don't care at all. At her rented cabin, she gathers strength, like a storm forming over the lake.
While looking for a spark in her life, a random coincidence leads Suzanne to try to unlock a harrowing event from her past. She is drawn into an unusual relationship with Alpha Breville, a convicted criminal with a disturbing history; simultaneously, she begins seeing an unpredictable, dark-haired drifter—a cowboy who's part angel, part howling dog. Though the cowboy matches Suzanne in intensity and desire, he's less faithful than the captive Breville.
Which man can offer Suzanne the knowledge she seeks? Which man can truly touch her? How can she find her unique peace?
In writing that has been likened to Kate Chopin's, Maureen Gibbon constructs a taut story of desire at the other end of the Mississippi, in the north woods of Minnesota. Against deep lakes, casinos, and a bar named the Royal, Gibbon's unconventional characters show us how to play the hands we're dealt and own the choices we make, in a tough and tender book about hard-won redemption from one of America's most original writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After placing a personal ad in the local paper, Suzanne, the narrator of Gibbon's abysmal latest (after Swimming Sweet Arrow), is shocked and intrigued when she gets a response from an inmate. Having always been interested in black sheep and underdogs, Suzanne writes back, and, as it turns out, Alpha Breville, her prison pen-pal, is a convicted rapist, which strikes Suzanne as providential, as she was raped as a teenager. Thinking maybe she can work out some of the lingering trauma of that event, she embarks on a tempestuous relationship with Breville, first through a series of candid letters, then through visits to the prison. While at first she finds it therapeutic to figure out the other side of the rape coin, Suzanne must ultimately face the fact that this miscalculated experiment in self-liberation can depend on no one but herself. But what's in it for the reader is anyone's guess; Suzanne is less a character than a phoned-in grotesque thrown together to serve the requirements of an ill-considered story of petty self-enlightenment.