Description
Somebody by Laurie Blauner
ISBN 978-0930773663
Visit Laurie’s website at www.laurieblauner.com
In Laurie Blauner’s Somebody, an overbearing, ’50s-era party girl marries a succession of men, each one a projection of a life she would like to live rather than any kind of pragmatic assessment of the actual men. Her two daughters, Lizzie and Claire, somehow manage to survive and grow up in their mother’s fragmented house by maintaining an insistent belief that somehow, everything will get put together. Lizzie and Claire think when they finally move out and have control of their lives they’ll be able to assemble cohesive existences. Instead, finally, they reconcile themselves to their fractured lives.
“…strikingly original…” Matt Briggs, Tablet
Somebody won a King County Arts Commission Award for Publication. Laurie Blauner has received a grant from NEA, several Seattle Arts Commission grants and an Artist Trust grant for fiction. She wrote four books of poetry and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The Georgia Review and others. Laurie lives in Seattle, WA.
Reviews
“Somebody is special in the way all very good novels are – simple elements in the hands of a very good writer create a complex brew. In this case, those elements involve mother-daughter relationships, mostly absent fathers, deceitful or indifferent lovers. Laurie Blauner, a fine poet with a masterly command of language and imagery, has written a wonderfully poignant novel of growing up, of getting out to seek a life of fulfillment and, possibly, happiness. I was absolutely taken with the language and the amazing images and metaphors.”
—James Welch, author of The Heartsong of Charging Elk and Fool’s Crow
“Laurie Blauner’s novel, Somebody, is a poet’s novel in every way you could hope for. Her words do more than merely move forward this story of an American girl’s growing up. They layer and dart and resonate the way images do in dreams. The wounded father, the abandoned wife, the daughter is every, in some sad, utterly human way, somebody who wishes she could be somebody
else.”—Rebecca Brown, author of The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary and The Gifts of the Body
“It is obvious from the opening lines of Laurie Blauner’s first novel that she is first and foremost a very talented poet. Blauner creates images rich with feeling and color, transforming the seemingly insignificant into the extraordinary.”
—Willamette Week
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