FICTION
08.03.03
J. David Santen
Rebecca Donner's debut novel, "Sunset Terrace" is the story of a grief-stricken mother putting her life back together in Los Angeles, and the daughter disappearing into the shadows of emotional isolation. When 9-year-old Hannah Kierson, her mother, Elaine, and little sister, Daisy, arrive at Sunset Terrace one evening in May of 1983, it is their 12th move in three years of living out of motels in remote Western towns: another fresh start for a family haunted by the ghost of the girls' father's suicide.
The residents of the six-unit, rent-controlled Sunset Terrace are mostly single mothers, and for their offspring, it is a 1983 world: Pac-Man and "Porky's" movies, hand-slap songs and mini-marts. Bridget is the children's leader - 9 years old and at once chaotic and thrilling, friend and foe, a foster child from a background of horrific abuse constantly daring the others to shoplift, to run away, to lie.
Elaine is drawn to Bridget, seeing a chance at personal redemption in salvaging this poor child. Burdened with misplaced guilt over her husband's suicide, Elaine reaches out to Bridget, gestures that inadvertently isolate Hannah.
Hannah seeks in Bridget a solution to her own loneliness, an end to being the outsider in every school in every town. "For Hannah, the classrooms swirled together, losing distinction. Kids with the same sizing-up stares. On playgrounds, shouting. In hallway huddles, with their quiet backs. Their intricate codes, games, hands deft with their manipulations of string, marbles, pennies, folded paper."
As their friendship grows, so does Hannah's trust in Bridget, who, however, remains elusive.
The book's opening chapter describes Bridget's elaborate and successful scheme to add "Bridget '83" to the litany of names etched like epitaphs along the complex's concrete pathway. She resembles a modern Huck Finn in her running away, feigning death, thievery and bravado. But unlike Huck, her life offers no escape raft, only a storage locker where she squirrels away stolen candy bars, smokes purloined Virginia Slims, and misplaces the trust of others.
"Sunset Terrace" is the fist novel for Donner, the former literary director of the Sunday fiction series at New York City's KGB Bar and editor of "On the Rocks: The KGB Bar Fiction Anthology." Donner, who grew up in Southern California, aptly captures the trauma and confusion of age 9 and sets it against an L.A. backdrop fenced with chain-link and crowded highways, covered in broken concrete and sweltering heat and cramped by poverty. There are no postcards from Sunset Terrace.
The narrative alternates between Hannah's and her mother's perspectives as each gradually becomes immersed in her own Sunset Terrace community. The rich characters are a strength of the novel: the cranky widow downstairs, the talkative male divorcee from the the singles group who reminds Elaine of her late husband, the busybody Mormon mother next door, the wild children - even the pet cemetery's expired residents.
Each person is like a card to be played, thickening the plot when deftly flipped onto the pile. While these characters' overt declarations occasionally tip the author's hand to the reader (Elaine is particularly guilty of this), this mystery is not whether bad things will happen, but when.
"Sunset Terrace's" journey from May until September (the where-are-they-now epilogue notwithstanding), is an exorcism of old ghosts and a conjuring of new ones; "Sunset Terrace" is, in the end, a book about beginnings, for Hannah and Elaine as well as for this talented author.
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J. David Santen recently reviewd "King Bongo" by Thomas Sanchez for the Oregonian.