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May 2, 2011
A children's book author excavates her past in Briscoe's taut follow-up to Sleep with Me. Cecilia Bannon returns to her childhood home on the English moor with her husband and children to care for her mother, Dora. The novel moves back and forth from the current story to the 1970s, when Dora moved to the country, hoping for a life of bohemian freedom and artistic expression for her children, an ideal that takes shape at Hayes House, the local progressive school. But Cecilia's English teacher, James Dahl, has a different lesson in store for the girl, and his indulgence in her school girl crush leads to a very real pregnancy that ends with an informal adoption. Back in the present, Cecilia, now a mother to three girls, is so haunted by having given up her first daughter that she embarks on a mission to find her, though what she discovers isn't at all what she expected. Briscoe depicts this world of few rules and many consequences with honesty and with compassion. In lucid, observant prose, she captures the messiness of family and, crushingly, the consequences of desire.

May 15, 2011

Infatuation and secrecy maintained over decades drive—very slowly—an intense three-generational saga of women's longings.

Briscoe's (Sleep with Me, 2005, etc.) novel traces the exquisite torture of twin impossible love-addictions suffered by Dora Bannan and her daughter Cecilia for a pair of teachers at a progressive English school in the 1970s. Dora lives a life of hippie squalor at Wind Tor, a rambling old house on Dartmoor, with her potter husband and four children. Her job teaching music introduces her to a shocking addiction: sex with impeccably dressed, emotionally remote art teacher Elisabeth Dahl. Elisabeth's husband James, who teaches English to clever 17-year-old Cecilia, eventually, guiltily, succumbs to the teenager's overpowering crush. But Cecilia doesn't tell James when she falls pregnant, and Dora never tells Cecilia what happened to the baby taken from her hours after the birth. Twenty years later, Cecilia has returned to Wind Tor with her own three children, partly to finish a book, partly to care for cancer-stricken Dora. Briscoe's talent for dissecting miniscule shifts of emotion is mined to the limit in a story more devoted to mood and texture than pace. Haunted by the child she never knew, Cecilia reconnects with James, jeopardizing her relationship with the children around her and her partner, too. Snail's pace switches to headlong dash as the tale enters its final, inconclusive pages.

Although implausible and suffocating, this rapture of obsession and lyrical landscape is not unimpressive.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011
British author Briscoe's second novel (after Sleep with Me, 2005) tracks the obsessions of a mother and daughter who fall under the sway of a married couple of teachers at a progressive school in the 1970s. Dora Bannon despairs of her squalid lifestyle at Wind Tor, a dilapidated house on the moors in Dartmoor, with her artisan husband, their four children, and the motley assortment of vagabonds renting rooms on the fly. When she is drawn to elegant art teacher Elisabeth Dahl, she is appalled and excited by the attraction to another woman. Meanwhile, her 17-year-old daughter, Cecilia, develops an overwhelming infatuation with English teacher James Dahl, whose academic rigor is a welcome antidote to the chaos that rules her family. Twenty years later, Cecilia returns to her childhood home to take care of her ill mother, and both women reckon with the high price they ultimately paid for love. Briscoe painstakingly details every emotional shift and turn as she summons the romance of the moors and offers a devastating depiction of the carefree '70s.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)