Paisley Girl

by Fran Gordon

Book Overview

In this bold literary debut, Gordon tells the story of a woman's painful and liberating struggle to reconcile her body, the onset of mast-cell leukemia, and her dreams. Her discovery takes her from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312203527
• ISBN13: 9780312203528
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.6" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

The Abstract Figure...

A young groupie in the eighties develops a rare blood disease which seemingly makes her allergic to her own skin. After going through the trauma of hospitalization, she takes off for the Caribbean for some carpe diem. Paisley Girl is about her funny, sad, and lyrical journey, and the people she encounters. Despite the subject-matter, Gordon never devolves into sentimentality or tearfulness. If anything, Paisley Girl is an uplifting novel about a young girl's desire to say "yes" to life despite all odds.

Stunning

I was lucky enough to have heard the author read from this novel when it was still a work in progress. The prose was as stunning then as it is now on the printed page.

A weird and startling journey

This book violently grabs your attention and forces you into a foreign, yet strangely familiar world. You are fascinated and repelled at the same time that you yourself become more developed and glamorous. A curious book which I highly recommend to anyone who knows risks always pay off.

A short, sharp, thrilling debut

Fran Gordon's novel is simply one of the most arresting pieces of first fiction I have ever encountered. The author's command of the language is wide and wild; her narrator's voice is blessed with a graceful, playful mental acuity that reaffirms the primacy of the mind and soul even in the face of her body's faithless dissolution. Funny, impassioned, very much alive, PAISLEY GIRL is a book that will revive your faith in the power of written language to map the jagged geography of the human heart.