Hold Still: A Novel [Hardcover]

Maya Taylor, an intense, gifted English professor, has a tendency to retreat when she is needed most, escaping on long morning runs or finding comfort in the well-thumbed novels in her library. But when she sends her daughter Ellie to Florida to care for a friends child, its with the best of intentions. Twenty and spiraling, Ellie is lost in a fog of drugs and mendesperately in need of a fresh start. Her life with this attractive new family in Florida begins well, but Ellie is crippled by the fear that shell only disappoint those around her . . . again. And in the sprawling hours of one humid afternoon, she finally makes a mistake she cannot take back.What keeps the pages turning is the desperate, botched attempts at familial love between family members, none of whom seem to know quite what they want, bringing to mind the Tolstoy quote, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Here, the mercurial rendering of this particular unhappy family makes it a heart-wrenching read in its very own way.Lynn Steger Strong has a great eye for the visible world, a near perfect sensor for those of us living in it, and a deep compassion and curiosity for how we go astray and find ourselves again.A tragedy lurks at the heart of Lynn Steger Strongs achingly sad, achingly beautiful debut novel. How do you forgive your child after she does the unthinkable? How can you not?Strong has produced a family saga both familiar and strange, told in kaleidoscopic detail, dancing back and forth in time, balletically slow yet always knife tight, philosophical, interrogative and smart. I read with my heart in my throat.Lynn Strong is clearly a spy. The espionage-level attention paid to the most seemingly invisible things and words and gestures that comprise the world, well, I feel like Strong broke a code that nobody else has broken. She allows us to better understand what we often see but fail to fully comprehend. Also this novel is really heartbrls)