Sunset Terrace
Rebecca Donner
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 MacAdam Cage
ISBN: 1931561346

During the summer of 1983, Elaine & her daughters move into a squalid, low-rent apartment building in Los Angeles.

Sunset Terrace begins with “There was no terrace and you couldn't see the sunset but that's what the building was called all the same...” (P. 3) For a while, I too lived in such an apartment building, further north in Berkeley. I know exactly what Rebecca Donner describes so well, & it was a drab, depressing existence.

This mother & her daughters, eleven year-old Hannah & six year-old Daisy, arrive in their beat-up car, at the end of a three year flight from tragedy ever since Hannah discovered her deranged father dead in his study.

They settle into the sixplex where every woman is on some kind of welfare, all the children run ragged & through the walls you can hear everything. Across the carlot is a school playground on the other side of the chainlink fence. This is where the children migrate during those summer vacation days.

Standing apart from the tribe of children is Bridget, a girl with a devastating history, a feral energy, & a foster mother. It is Bridget who seduces Hannah into mischief even as she worms her way into Elaine's mother's heart.

It is unkempt Bridget, with her wild ways who draws Hannah into the wise ways of survival on this side street in a vast California city. As the endless summer bears down, children play their ferocious games, & Elaine searches for a better life.

One of the things Hannah has managed to hang onto during those three long years on the road from Spokane, is a turtle, who nurtures her broken heart, & soothes her shuttered senses. It is to this turtle she tells all as she cares for its shoebox home, & it is this beloved creature who she must offer in appeasement for the tragedy which ends that new & strange summer.

Sunset Terrace is a shattering story of life on the edge of sanity, poverty & hopelessness. Of women struggling (or not!) for safety, for happiness, for purpose. It is also a remarkable story of how children interact, how they see the world, & how they survive (or not!).

Memorable & engrossing debut novel!
(05/02/04)

Rebecca