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Breaking Her Fall, by Stephen Goodwin
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Just before eleven on an ordinary summer night in Washington, D.C., Tucker Jones picks up the phone, expecting to hear that his teenage daughter, Kat, is back from the movies. But the caller is another parent, a man who tells Tucker that Kat was actually at a party-and makes a shocking allegation about what happened to her there. In a blind rage, Tucker races to the party to find Kat already departed, but his full-boil interrogation of the boys still present spills over into a confrontation-and ends with one of the boys crashing into a glass tabletop. In a second, his rage turns to remorse, and he soon finds himself under arrest. Tucker could easily lose his home and his business, but he is most concerned about losing his daughter. Stephen Goodwin writes with insight and rare power about the way that passion rearranges lives.
As Tucker and Kat and everyone around them seek to repair the damages of that night, Breaking Her Fall charts their uncommonly difficult passage from despair to reconciliation and hope with extraordinary grace.
- Sales Rank: #1554991 in Books
- Brand: Goodwin, Stephen
- Published on: 2004-05-03
- Released on: 2004-05-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .96" w x 5.30" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Goodwin's first novel in over two decades (after Blood of Paradise, 1979) is psychologically acute, if somewhat overplotted. Tucker Jones is a 44-year-old divorced father of two living in Washington, D.C. His life is settled in a comfortable routine until the night he receives an enigmatic phone call informing him that his 14-year-old daughter, Kat, has been involved in sexual games at a party. Blinded by worry and rage, Tucker finds the party and confronts a group of boys while looking for Kat; before the night is over, a high school junior loses his eye, and Tucker becomes embroiled in criminal proceedings that threaten to destroy his career (he owns a landscape business), family and financial stability. Goodwin tackles many subplots, including Tucker's relationship with Kat and her younger brother, Will; the ongoing litigation; and an affair that Tucker has with the mother of Kat's best friend. Tucker's reflections ramble from his son's fishing exploits to his ex-wife to the garage band he has formed with several other parents in the neighborhood. The plot becomes so busy that Goodwin loses control of the narrative at points. Still, the author's emotional compass is unfailing; he offers a memorable exploration of familial love and penance, with a likably bewildered-and articulate-protagonist: "I groaned with lust and remorse and an awareness of the disorder that seemed ready to swallow me up."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In this emotionally charged novel, Goodwin (The Blood of Paradise, 1979) homes in on parents' deepest fears and their all-too-flawed attempts to keep their children safe. Single-father Tucker Jones receives a late-night phone call informing him that his 14-year-old daughter, Kat, is in trouble. She was spotted at a party drinking vodka shooters and engaging in sex games with some older boys. Tucker, overcome with a deep, burning fury, goes to the scene of the party and within a few short minutes becomes involved in a melee in which high-school senior Jed Vandenberg is seriously injured. Jed's wealthy and influential father has Tucker arrested and served with a lawsuit that could ruin him. Suddenly, Tucker finds the list of house rules posted on their refrigerator ("Show up on time") woefully inadequate. Goodwin gets so many things right here--the halting, painful conversations between father and daughter; the fact that the grievously injured Jed was not one of the boys who took advantage of Kat; the way Tucker has shut himself down to avoid further pain after his bitter divorce; and, especially, the tenacity of a father's love for his children. Reminiscent of the work of Robert Boswell, this is a layered, compassionate, extraordinarily graceful novel. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"... a frank, plain-spoken, passionate novel that got its grips on me...." -- Richard Ford
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Goodwin eclipses his wonderful "The Blood of Paradise"....
By L. Quido
"Breaking Her Fall" - the title says what we all feel about our daughters; about the peculiar loss of them as they enter the teenage years, the years in which their ability to be a person in their own right is eclipsed by the pressures of a society gone mad in depicting the sexuality of a "woman" as young as 14. Tucker's daughter Kat, at 14, is in the throes of this hormonal madness, and he doesn't even know it. Tucker's an oddity, a father who has won primary custody of daughter and son when his former wife moved up the social ladder and mostly out of their lives.
It's hard not to like Tucker, who's a self-made man, with a love for music and a need to be there for his children. It is with some trepidation that we watch him turn to rage when Kat is involved in a sex scandal at the home of a boy he knows nothing about. In slow motion, his rage leads to injury and disfigurement of the boy, and incarceration and trial. But his trials are many, both in trying to understand and protect his daughter, keep his younger son from fear, his love for his best friend's wife at bay, and himself from going mad.
The strain of parenting adolescents in this mixed up world is brought to the fore in Kat's tale, and although it is written in first person from Tucker's point of view, there is no doubt that author Stephen Goodwin was able to get inside the heads of all his main characters...from children Kat and Will to the amazing Lilly, from Trish, his ex-wife who attempts to preserve her motherhood from the tragedy, to the teenaged Jed Vandenberg, with a permanent scar from a heated misunderstanding. Goodwin makes them all come alive on the page. And he does more, something more, that, for me, brings the book to life - he brings in the ordinary; talks about the what the notes on his refrigerator say, talks about the demise of his marriage, has a remarkable reaction (like many of us) to the first time he hears the beautiful songs of the posthumous Eva Cassidy CD, "Songbird". ..."as I danced with my daughter, her eyes searching mine, the two of us just floating, I felt something give way inside of me....as though all our old love, every particle of it, had been restored to us by the music we were hearing."
As my own daughter grew up, I remember times of anger and despair that seemed like an out of body experience, and so it is with Tucker... in describing his violent reaction to young Jed Vandenburg, at a time where he had no idea where his 14-year old daughter was and if she was all right..."I can remember how the air seemed to stiffen and tighten, how every word and tiny gesture took on a huge significance, and how the hair on the back of my neck suddenly bristled".
Goodwin is a writer of style and grace, his book a revelation and a scare for parents and adolescents, a book that will stay with you longer than the details of the story itself.
A definite must read!
27 of 34 people found the following review helpful.
Breaking My Fall
By Memoir Lover
This book is awesome! From the first moment I cracked open Breaking Her Fall, I found myself a huge fan of Tucker Jones, rooting for his safe return from his perilous journey-entirely modern, entirely timeless-into all matters of the heart. Graceful, deft, humorous, more than a heartfelt account of fatherly love, Breaking is the story of a single father trying to reach his teenage daughter, his son; it's the story, also, of a man who must learn to put the past behind him and venture out into unchartered territory, towards relationships where love-meaningful love-is honored above safer, more complacent, constructs. By book's end I felt appropriately challenged-to love honestly; to love better. To find a love that matters. Thank you, Mr. Goodwin. You have delivered us a true gift: a story that is both a marvelous adventure and a call to action. Wake up! Read the book. Your heart will thank you.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A father � daughter relationship caught on the brink
By A Customer
The year is 1998 and the Clinton sex scandals are plaguing the White House; all over the country people are talking and passing judgment on the President. This unlikely setting forms the backdrop for Stephen Goodwin's ambitious, intelligent and somewhat overemotional story of teenage sex, and family relationships. Although to some extent melodramatic in places, Breaking Her Fall is still a very accomplished, and at times, quite riveting domestic drama, that really captures you from the outset, and embraces you in its entirety.
One night Tucker Jones, an American "ordinary man" - a loving and devoted father receives a hostile phone call from another parent who blames his thirteen-year-old daughter, Kat, for indulging in a drunken sexual orgy with some boys at a party. This sets of a chain reaction of violence and recrimination, which reverberates throughout Tucker's entire life affecting his children, his ex-wife, his current girlfriend, and his best friends. On the surface, the story passes for an attention-grabbing legal drama, where Tucker - accused of assaulting one of the boys - fights to save his reputation, and his innocence. But, in reality, the story is much more than this: Goodwin introduces us to a subtle domestic world seething with pent up tensions - strained relationships between ex-wives; father-daughter relationships that are not what they seem; unspoken sexual passions between best friends that are clandestinely acted upon, and teenage pregnancy which inevitably rears its controversial head.
Goodwin writes with a clear confidence of a professional, and he keeps the narrative taught and tight by placing the story in the first person and always telling the story through Tucker's point of view, The narrative flows with a gentleness and ease, never loosing sight of its focus, and the author is determined to share with us every aspect of Tucker's life - from his days doing drugs in college, to the history of his courtship with his ex-wife Trish, to his decision to leave the corporate world, and build an independent life for himself as a landscape gardener. The strength of Breaking Her Fall is also in its enthusiastically believable characters: There's the somewhat self-obsessed and hot-headed main protagonist Tucker, who doesn't think before he acts, but who loves his two children dearly; there's Kat, Tucker's teenage daughter - impetuous, rude, conflicted and unhappy, and there's Tucker's best friend Lily, naive and kind, whose only crime is to want more passion in her life and be the woman who Tucker really loves. There are lots of other supporting characters that weave with equal grace in and out of the narrative, each contributing their own stories, and each influencing Tucker's life in one way or another.
About half way through the book, the character of Lily, speaking at her father's funeral talks about how her father made her feel safe and rescued, and that if she "fell" her father would be there to catch her. Perhaps this reflects the thematic core of the novel in that there should always be someone there to catch us if we fall. Loneliness, loss, the inability to communicate, family structures, the value of friendships, and the ability to be able to make the "right" decision are all presented in Breaking Her Fall with an astute and sensitive clarity. This is a very perceptive and emotionally sensitive piece of work.
Michael
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