![]() With AIDS as the backdrop in 1986 New York, the failed attempts of high-rise window washer Novak (given name Pamela, but known just as Novak) and her disabled father, Ed, to understand each other’s affection are heart-rending. He fails at stained glass but finds love, unaware that his sympathetic girlfriend, a rebellious daughter desperate to escape her wealthy, overbearing family, offers a skewed mirror of his indifferent mother. Stung more by their disinterest than their disappointment in him, the 18-year-old leaves their Chicago home to apprentice at a stained-glass studio in “their least favorite city,” Boston. In 1938, Edward Novak knows nothing of his parents’ past. ![]() ![]() The glass bee he gives Agnes will thread its way through the novel, a small detail of growing resonance, a lovely merging of image, theme, and plot. In 1910, Boston socialite Agnes Carter renounces wealth and respectability (and perhaps her moral compass) for glass blower Ignace Novak, drawn to his talent, passion, and lucidity. Characters sometimes see each other with joyous clarity but often with distortions or not at all. Glass-sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, both sturdy and fragile-serves as the novel’s primary metaphor while anchoring its plot. ![]() This sophisticated debut from Wolfgang-Smith traces an evolving emotional legacy through four generations of a family while examining the basic question of "how to love something without letting it have everything." ![]()
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