cover image Blue Glass

Blue Glass

Sandra Tyler. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, $19.95 (293pp) ISBN 978-0-15-113225-6

This strong, thoughtful first novel about a young girl and her changing relationship with her parents develops with quiet momentum beneath its cool, unadorned surface. Leslie Flynn's pretty mother, Marion, oppresses her adolescent daughter and college professor husband, Dale, with her smothering love. Marion has few interests: she gardens, feeds birds and collects china ornaments. Fearing her husband's love is ebbing, Marion prods him for reassurance, driving him to accuse her of ``exhausting this entire family.'' When Dale moves out into his own cramped apartment and starts to date an anthropologist colleague, Leslie's coming-of-age crisis sharpens and she discovers, ``It was easier now to be his friend than his daughter.'' As her own sexual needs intensify, she makes difficult choices. Simple details point up the family struggle to jettison the past. Before leaving, Dale cuts down Marion's beloved ``dead'' crabapple tree where birds nested, but green shoots reappear. Abject, now more neurotic than ever, Marion compulsively cleans house, hauling memorabilia to the dump.to shorten review/ss Leslie's growing maturity leads at last to an affecting vision of her mother's love, which may be ``allowed to rest like a great lion in the shade of a tree.'' (June)