Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

Book Overview

In 1966, longon to escape Levittown and her self-absorbed artist father, 14-year-old Maude secures a scholarship to a prestigious prep school. As family tensions surface, she tries to find a place in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1569474311
• ISBN13: 9781569474310
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Soho Press
• Length: 261 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Aaaaah - happy ending!

I liked the book but I LOVED the ending! The main character, Maud, was truly deserving of the pleasures granted her in the final pages by the author. Most of the fiction I've read lately has resolutions which slowly dissolve to a melted-puddle-of-how-do-I-get-out-of-this, like that pesky ice on the front stairs in February. Not this one!

deep character study

Maude Pugh was raised in Levittown, Long Island. By the time she attended high school she concluded her parents were colossal failures who hid in a community in which all exterior houses were identical to one another. This she realizes enables them to act eccentric inside their home, but provide a veneer of respectability belonging outside. Her father, the artist Milt, has a fan club of one, himself. To better display his colorful work, every room in the house is painted black as night to provide the proper background. Her mother Nina feels inferior to everyone, the wealthier upscale neighbors, her spouse and even Maude. Her older brother Seth is a classic loser who fits right at home with the family of failures that reside in the Pugh residence; that explains why he ran way when he turned sixteen. Still Maude has dreams of truly making it in the art world; they seem to be occurring when she wins a scholarship to the prestigious Bay Farm prep school, but she only finds conformance and betrayal there even as her peers salivate over her being a bohemian artist's daughter; just like at home. This is an interesting look at social class and family politics through the eyes of an acute teen who knows her parents and sibling are losers in life yet they are the reason she is part of the in crowd. Maude is a fascinating protagonist who wants desperately to break the cycle, but hits glass ceilings from so-called friends especially a boyfriend. Fans of deep character studies inside the dynamics of a family drama will enjoy Maude's at times maudlin tale. Harriet Klausner