Book Review
Copyright (c) 1994, Steve Powers
All rights reserved


     The Tracks of Angels - Kelly Dwyer (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $22.95).

In her first novel, Kelly Dwyer has produced a beautiful, spellbinding
story. The Tracks of Angels is the tale of Laura Neuman, eighteen years
old and alone in the world. 

Dwyer's debut is an auspicious one, as she crafts an unforgettable
novel, told in clean, spare prose that shifts effortlessly between past
and present. The mood created wraps the reader in a cocoon just this
side of sentiment, creating a sense of wonder and sorrow. 

Laura's childhood and adolescence is described almost bitterly, with an
undercurrent of pain flowing through the narrative. 

As the narrative returns to the present, a sense of hope seems to float
tantalizingly just around the corner, blanketed with an intense
loneliness alleviated somewhat by the adventure of venturing into the
unknown territory of young adulthood. 

Fleeing a painful past, Laura arrives in Boston on a Greyhound bus. 
Laura chooses Boston as the place to start a new life because it lies
across an entire continent from her childhood home in southern
California. She feels that perhaps physical distance will ease hurtful
memories stemming from her mother's long battle with cancer, losing the
battle when Laura was twelve; and another tide of stinging remembrances
caused by her father's paralysis caused by an automobile accident,
leading to a plan to end his life and involving Laura in that plan. 

In a long, slow process, Laura begins to create her own roots in Boston.
She rents a tiny apartment, and lying about her previous job experience,
lands a waitressing job in a Italian restaurant, in quick order.  She
makes friends with an artist named Nadia and meets the mysterious David,
two people who have a profound influence upon her new life. 

She invests in a secondhand encyclopedia and begins to pore over its
contents letter by letter in a desperate attempt to expand her mind. 

Even as she feels a burgeoning sense of self, she still feels the sharp
tendrils of her past experiences curling around her, especially her role
in helping to end her father's life. Reflecting upon the environment she
was raised in, a household with two distinct religions and parents with
often differing opinions, she realizes that she lacks a spiritual
identity. 

This search leads her to imagining into life an angel, one who is there
in the darkest of nights, when she is alone in her room.  Only this
angel is not quite the glorified image of angels that we traditionally
perceive. 

This angel is world-weary, and while listening patiently to her
questions, admits that there are no easy answers, one whose wings are
frayed and one who comes to be very real to her in her search to make
sense of her confused life, "...sometimes at the very edge of sleep I
could almost, just faintly, hear the rustling of wings."

With the help of her imaginary angel, the fabric of her life begins to
knit together, giving her a solidity that she had not felt before, an
image far from her former image of herself as a small, lost and lonely
figure in a large town where she knew no one. 

Like the strains of a haunting melody, this book will burrow beneath the
reader's emotions to nestle deep in the heart. The emotions are oh so
bittersweet and evocative, causing some very real twinges of
recognition. 

In Laura Neuman, Kelly Dwyer has created a character who shows how much
our memories and past experiences, like a stone thrown in water, casts
huge ripples into our futures.