Bøger af Carol Lee Lorenzo

Viola - a drowned girl still alive, lives in a world of wondrous imagination, as she yearns for the ocean that almost took her. Taken inland by her mother to a menagerie of family and its passions, into a house as mysterious as an old movie theater, filled to the limit with those living and unforgotten dead, the exhilarating landscape of quirky family strains her love for the ocean and her connection to her father who saved her. She "knows" secrets that could ruin her mother and hurt her father, but if you lose family, who are you? Praise for "Under The Spell" "Under the Spell" by Carol Lee Lorenzo has beckoned us into the world of Viola, a young child with the imagination and dream life of a unique and creative soul. "Under the Spell" is finely and delicately wrought, both delightful and heart wrenching. Readers will be intrigued and in wonder with every page." - Trudy Nan Boyce, 2017 Georgia Author of the Year, author of "Out of the Blues," "Old Bones" and "The Policeman's Daughter." "Under the Spell is exquisite and unsettling, the saga of a large and messy family--but really it is nine year old Viola's story, her voice, her journey, her child's place in the complex doings of the grown ups around her. Viola is wise and funny, wonderfully observant, a worthy witness, a survivor. She is a character I won't soon forget. As for Carol Lee Lorenzo, she manages, somehow, to infuse each and every page with her own, very special virtuosity. " - Alexandra Curry, author of "The Courtesan".

A successful runaway at 15, Marsha lives free of her past in NYC and the mountains of upstate New York. She earns a living as an illustrator of botanicals but her passion is a game of 'catch and release' with men, luring them into affairs only to leave them. Now she finds herself caught in the lure of a weatherman, a storm chaser of sorts, who pursues her wildly unpredictable moods.With an unexpected call, she escapes her new life to return to her old home, to her mother, a florist, who cuts the living plants to present their ephemeral beauty. Now her mother's life is being cut short, her only wish is that her strong willed daughter keep her alive. Marsha struggles to maintain her balance between who she has become and the world she ran away from, the treacherous cliffs of her childhood home.With the weatherman still in pursuit, a steady pressure on the edges, Marsha learns to care for her mother, who remains aloof but increasingly dependent. Then a man appears who claims to be Marsha's father, setting in motion events that display the fragile beauty of love and its destructive power.REVIEW: Sleeping In Public moves gracefully through time and space, unpredictable as weather. It pieces together the story of Marsha, a tormented young woman who has created a life for herself in the New York theater world after fleeing an abusive home. Marsha has settled into a small apartment and has settled on a single lover when an unexpected call summons her back to her childhood home. As the novel unfolds, we witness birth, childhood, love, betrayal and death. The detail is so fine we see up close what's important. The characters are full and complex and include Dog, a fabulously rendered animal with a protective streak. Carol Lee Lorenzo is at the top of her game with keen insights into everything from drawing in the dark with oil-based pastels, to choosing the right man, to caring for a dying parent, to bathing an untouchable stray dog. Every scene is loaded with new and often surprising views of the world that stick with the reader long after reaching the end. - Joe Coberly, author and Atlanta native.

The lives on view in Nervous Dancer are complex and precarious. Speaking their familial idioms in tones and cadences determined well before they ever appeared in these stories, Carol Lee Lorenzos characters surge into moments of change for reasons initially not apparent. In the quirky, hard-edged ways in which they stumble, beg, come of age, fall apart, and reunite, they reveal no simple notions about life.The way women and children see men is often the focus of these stories, and female voices are the most numerous in Nervous Dancer. Singularity of character can be found in anyone, however, such as the nameless father in Unconfirmed Invitations, whose guilt over his drinking and marital infidelities leads to a bizarre hunter-gatherer compulsion. Lorenzos women are often mothers, like LuAnn Wilson Hunter in Something Almost Invisible, who says of herself and her son that they are divorced from everything, we are all living in slow motion, not at home anywhere. Others find themselves in double binds with generational friction compounding their troubles, such as Eulene in Nervous Dancer, who informs her mother, Just because Im in your house doesnt mean Ive lost the right to fight with my husband.Lorenzo says that her characters are in the throes of love with its impurities or as sterling as it comes, and sometimes they trip the spring and the hard face of hate appears. She believes that its not always the outside force, someone elses doing, that changes things or brings confrontation. Its our stranger within-our unspoken self that frightens and engages us. Thats what story allows us to see.