Lucid stars

by Andrea Barrett

The coming apart of what we've come to call the "intact nuclear family" is by now, at the end of the 1980s, familiar territory. But in this passionate and impressive debut we travel where we've never been before--into a world that has no name. What can we call the sum total of these strange recombined patterns of stepparents, half sisters, and understandings that spring up between ex-wives? No one like Benjamin Day has come close to Penny Webb's gravitational field before. And having looked to the night sky for logic and comfort since she was a little girl, Penny at age nineteen knows the real thing when she sees it--all light and fire. What begins as a classic boy-meets-girl tale of 1955, however, becomes something far different when marriage and two children do not bring the Days closer together. Lucid Stars is the moving story of how this family--with its distinctly modern contours--learns how to survive by being a planetary system that happens to be missing its sun.