High Strung

By Quinn Dalton

Book Overview

Years after running away from America and the mysteries surrounding her mother's death, Merle Winslow winds up editing trash novels at X Publishing in West London and shacked up with a drug-addled diplomat's son. Shaky and defeated, she heads home to Florence, Ohio, with no money and no idea of what to do next.
Meanwhile, Merle discovers that her brother Olin, rich and successful from marketing Marilyn Monroe meat thermometers, is poised to embark on a dubious performance art career, and that her stodgy father might be falling in love after years of living alone. As Merle looks for clues about her mother's life she uncovers disturbing new truths about her own romantic failings. She suspects she's never really escaped her old life; she's simply dragged it along with her, "like an outfit that was ill-fitting and too revealing, but impossible to get rid of." But with the help of her tough-talking grandmother, free-spirited brother, and a pilot who nurses a failing plane, Merle finally begins to face her family's checkered past and her own uncertain future.
In vivid cinematic prose, High Strung balances humor on the rough edge of loss, regret, and wounded family love. Merle is an unforgettable creation in an exhilarating debut novel from a young writer to watch.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743470192
• ISBN13: 9780743470193
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

High Strung: Character-driven Fiction at Its Best

No loose-ends are left undone in this novel about a thirty-something returning home to find closure regarding her past. Dalton masterfully weaves the Vietnam era to the present while presenting parents many of us know very well: flawed, ill-fated, but loving, nonetheless, in their own quirky ways. With characters not unlike those from a McMurtry novel, the reader will find him or herself laughing and crying with their struggles, compelled to turn each pleasurable page, to follow them to the book's end.

High Strung

This is one of those few and far between books that both my husband and I enjoyed. The interesting characters and unfolding plot kept our attention until the end. I can't wait until Quinn has her next book published!

Love This Book!

This book is terrific. The characters are quirky, but they ring true. The double mother and daughter plots are intriguiing as the two characters work through intersecting demons to figure out their lives. It's a great read for the chick-lit crowd and for those who lived through the peace, love and protest bombs. This was a fun read and a very thought-provoking novel. I'll be looking for more from Quinn Dalton.

Read this!

I had the pleasure of reading an early copy of this book for blurb purposes, a blurb I happily handed over. It's a stunner of a debut! Keep an eye out for Dalton's short story collection -- Bulletproof Girl. The stories are complex and startling and stunning, ripe for discussions about womanhood in contemporary American society.

High Strung Strikes a Definite Chord

I liked this book and would recommend it without hesitation. The strength is the narrator, Merle. At her best, Merle's voice is authentic; she's smart, witty, passionate almost without realizing it. Merle's observations and her plight struck a definite chord with me as one of those, like her, who grew up in the seventies and eighties, went off to conquer the world (or at least edit porn books in London -- Merle, not me) in the nineties, and is now back nosing around the past, taking stock of how life and our loves have unfolded so far. The author, Quinn Dalton, offers up very sharp insights and a ruthless humor, the kind that comically but firmly doesn't allow people to wriggle free from accountability for their own actions. Great work in a first novel!