Full Description
During the summer of 1983, Elaine and her daughters, Hannah and Daisy, move into Sunset Terrace, a squalid, low-rent apartment building in Los Angeles that houses single mothers. They have been on the road for three years, driving from town to town in a flight from tragedy ever since Hannah discovered her father dead in his study. While Elaine struggles to make ends meet and construct a new life for herself in California, Hannah--a shy, lonely girl whose only companion in the shuffle of schools has been her pet turtle--develops an earnest affection for Bridget, a vivacious, foul-mouthed nine-year-old in Apartment One who was abandoned as an infant in a supermarket parking lot. Bridget quickly becomes Hannah's best friend, teaching her how to play tricks and climb a chain-link fence and steal candy. Elaine becomes captivated by Bridget as well, encouraging her to come over for dinners and sleepovers, taking on the role of a surrogate mother. Compelled by pity for the wayward girl, Elaine is blind to Bridget's dangerous influence on Hannah, who at the summer's end takes part in a malicious game that irrevocably alters the course of all of their lives. When I was nine, living in an apartment building in Los Angeles, there was a little girl downstairs whose mother kicked her out of their apartment for three days to punish her for stealing candy from the corner liquor store. She spent the night huddled in a small storage cabinet above the cars in the parking lot, eating the stolen candy for her meals. Several months later, her family moved out of the building suddenly. I never got to know her very well, but she remained in my memory as a sort of haunting presence, and I always wondered whatever became of her. Sunset Terrace is, in one sense, my attempt to better acquaint myself with her, to learn about her through fiction in a way I never got to in real life. While Sunset Terrace is a work of fiction, it is grounded in some basic truths that I came to know living in the midst of all the razzle-dazzle of Los Angeles, yet being entirely removed from it. During those years my family, like the others who lived in the building, received welfare. In my novel, I wanted to explore the lives of those in Los Angeles who remain on the margins, who fall through the cracks. The building I lived in didn't have a name, but in the novel I gave it one, "Sunset Terrace, " a place that offers to its residents neither a terrace nor a glimpse of the sunset. In writing Sunset Terrace, the apartment building of my childhood became for me a springboard from which my imagination could take flight. After many drafts, it became clear to me that the best point of entry into Sunset Terrace was through the eyes of both a child and an adult. Elaine, a recently widowed mother, sees the two-story stucco building as a safe haven from her past, a place where she can start over and at last get on her feet. Her reclusive daughter Hannah, finding herself in a community of delinquent children, sees Sunset Terrace as a place of menace, but gradually comes to adjust to her new home. This book is about struggle and survival, about the capacity for joy in the midst of tragedy, and about the scars we have to show for it. Rebecca Donner is certainly wise beyond her years--she is poised and accomplished and full of perspective. But she also clearly remembers what it was like to be nine years old, longing forfriendship and the secrets most everyone else seems to know. Sunset Terrace is a captivating, haunting book; you will be in good hands from beginning to end.--A.S.
