And She Was: A Novel

By Cindy Dyson

Book Overview

There are places that can remake you -- slippery, gray places. Places that hold their secrets in the fog and whisper them on the wind. And when Brandy, a floundering, trashy, Latin-spewing cocktail waitress, finds herself drifting across the line between the ordinary world and just such a place, something fearsome and beautiful happens. Something changes. Sweeping across centuries and into the Aleutian Islands of Alaska's Bering Sea, And She Was begins with a decision and a broken taboo when three starving Aleut mothers decide to take their fate into their own hands and survive the devastation of Russian conquest. The shadow of their heroic and tragic decision reaches forward across the generations, and as cultural upheavals undulate through the Aleutian chain, their descendants are willing to risk even more as the gold rush and World War II internment threatens their people's survival. Two hundred and fifty years later, by the time Brandy steps ashore in the 1980s, Unalaska Island has absorbed their dark secret, a secret that is both salvation and shame. Brandy doesn't know why she's there. She's too old and too smart to be drifting so close to the edge of the known world. As usual, she is following a man with curly hair and no long-range goals. She takes a job slinging drinks at the notoriously dangerous Elbow Room, studies Aleutian history, learns to ride a motorcycle, and with a practiced psyche avoids thinking about her withered past and her abandoned future. She is fighting her own battle for survival, a battle she does not even recognize. But the island's secret follows her -- in the odd bathroom graffiti, the old Aleut women who hike in the night, the unexplained deaths clouding the island, and the enigmatic smile of a young Aleut woman sketched centuries before. Brandy begins to pay attention. She begins to long for her life to change. In a tense interplay between past and present, And She Was explores Aleut history, taboos, mummies, conquest, survival, and the seamy side of the 1980s in a fishing boomtown at the edge of the world. It leaps across time and culture to a lost woman, who more than anything needs to understand the gray shades between heroism and evil, between freedom and bondage, between this place and the rest of her life.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060597704
• ISBN13: 9780060597702
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: William Morrow
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Haunting read

I loved this book. Very smart read. There was a lot going on..the troubled central figure with an alcoholic father and run-around mother who tries to escape by moving to a remote Alaskan island. Her insights into Greek culture. And then the look into Aleutian women..fascinating. I can't wait for this author to produce another book!

Fascinating Read

This book was fascinating on so many levels. The setting of the Aleutian Islands is very unique and the place is like a character in and of itself. Very atmospheric. The story of the Aleutian women was also fascinating. One part history of a place, and one part anthropoligical study of a people. The way the author interweaves this with Brandy's story is just brilliant. I was hooked from page one and couldn't wait to finish the story to see how everything turned out, but then when it was over I didn't want it to end. This is definitely a book I will never forget. One of those books that gets under your skin and you just want it to stay there.

The kind of book that makes reading addictive

I won't recap the plot here since others have done that, but I'll just add that this is the kind of book that keeps me coming back for more. The character, Brandy still lives on in my head months later. If you like reading about adventure, history and mystery and especially about other women's lives, you'll like this book. Well done! Keep writing please, Cindy!

buy an extra copy to loan out

This is not a beach book. It is a book to read late at night under a warm quilt with a glass of brandy on the table. The story of Brandy (a girl, not the drink) will keep you up reading all night and phoning in sick to finish it. She is a woman that everyone knows; trashy, drifting, and slipping into middle age without anything to live for. Dyson takes her to the end of the earth (Dutch Harbor Alaska), to a feirce and proud people, and to their dark history in order to set her free. In the process she learns that in the world of heros and monsters the one who will not choose is perhaps the most dangerous, and that nothing is more important than living with intent. At times chilling, at times hillarious, this is a great story by a fierce new story teller. Buy two

The Whole Point of Fiction

The point of good fiction is to present alternative points of view, to transport the reader into the world of another, to suspend belief, to see life through a new, and often blurred, set of eyes. Dyson does that when she brings blonde-haired Brandy, a woman who has spent her whole life following men she's never cared about, to this remote Alaskan town at the end of the world. It is here, against the backdrop of lost souls and mythical women that Brandy finally sees why her life has turned out the way it has and gathers the strength to change it. Dyson in no way denigrates Alaska or the Alaskan women, rather she exposes a cross-section of life there, some good, some not so good. And she does it in poetry. I strongly recommend this book.