Ohio Angels

by Harriet Scott Chessman

Book Overview

In this arresting first novel, Harriet Scott Chessman creates a luminous and sometimes disturbing world out of an Ohio landscape of mulberry trees and mowed lawns. The result is a moving portrait of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583225196
• ISBN13: 9781583225196
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Ohio Angels a superb debut

This is the beautiful FIRST novel (not second!) by the acclaimed author of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper. Both Ohio Angels and Lydia Cassatt . . . center around questions of an artist's effort to understand and represent someone much loved. And in both, Chessman imagines what it's like to be on the other side of the canvas. I found this earlier story as intimate and moving as the second, and interesting in its use of fragments, each offering a different character's point of view. I recommend it to anyone who cherishes writing that lingers with you long after you come to the last word.

About the emotional conflicts of two female friends

Ohio Angels is Harriet Scott Chessman's debut novel about the emotional conflicts of two female friends who have to balance their own talents and needs with the demands of family - whether caring for an aging, demanding mother or supporting a husband's career or abandoning one's own talents to look after children. Very strongly recommended for its thoughtful examination of conflicting pulls upon woman's life, Ohio Angels very clearly documents Chessman as an accomplished novelist with a particular gift for writing literate prose with a pronounced lyrical flair.

a pleasure to read; lyrical and smooth

I was lucky enough to be handed this book before a long train ride after a tiring day. I don't know why PW calls it "glum": yes, bad things happen to people. This book is about HOPE and REDEMPTION and second chances for wounded people. I don't want to give away the plot, but anyone who likes a great story told in moving language will enjoy this book. Not unlike the touching work of Kay Gibbons. Share it with a friend!

Lyrical novel explores mothering, love, and friendship.

In this fine first novel, Harriet Scott Chessman introduces the reader to two wonderful characters, Rose, mother of two, pregnant with a third child, and Hallie, thirty-seven, wanting a child. Rose lives in a small Ohio town, and has given up an academic career. She dreams of writing children's books, while surrounded by the happy details of daily life with her daughters. Hallie, a painter, lives in New York, but engages again with her close friend when she returns to visit her parents in the Ohio town where she and Rose grew up. Across the small town lawns, porches, and sidewalks, fragrant with bloom and humid in the summer heat, Chessman builds a delicate story.In luminous prose, Chessman reveals the entwined childhoods and emotional preoccupations of these close friends. The descriptions of motherhood, birth, parenting, and loss are exquisite. This short novel is wonderful summer reading, highly recommended for individual readers and for book groups.