Synopsis
The residents of a small coastal town in Florida populate this novel in which a newlywed couple's troubles make up most of the action. When Faye, the wife, is kidnapped and raped, her husband Vic evades his wife's trauma by moving out and seeing other women. Faye undergoes further trauma when a car accident puts her into a coma. She emerges from unconsciousness with brain damage and memory loss, but with the determination to attain a new independence and get on with her life.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1995-09-01 | | Editor: | Barbara Bristol |
| Size | | Length: | 451 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 7.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.8 in | | Weight: | 29.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
A large and large-hearted novel that takes on, with irony and humor, the subject of marriage and the obdurate persistence of love.
Set on the Florida coast, in the small fishing town of Sanavere, "Familiar Heat" spans a few years in the lives of an assortment of characters, each precisely and vividly imagined--hardworking shrimpers, net menders, and fishermen; priests; shopkeepers; and a vibrant community of Cuban exiles still reliving--after thirty years--the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Against this background, we follow several inter-connected marriages in various kinds of trouble.
At the center is the marriage of Faye Perry, a beguiling young woman, and Vic Rios, captain of a Cuban charter boat and reformed rake ("that devil in a blue shirt," Faye's mother calls him). As the novel opens, Faye is on the way into the bank when she interrupts a robbery in progress and is taken hostage. What happens to her is brutal enough ("There is no fate worse than death," Faye assures herself during the ordeal), but it leads to a series of even more traumatic events, culminating in an accident that leaves her without memory of who she is. When her husband reverts to his old rakish ways, their estrangement seems irreversible: a man who wishes to forget he was ever married and a woman who hasn't a clue. If the town were not such a small one, if Mary Hood were not such a magical writer, that might be the end of it...
Instead, we are increasingly drawn into this exciting, lyrical, funny, and down-to-earth tale that shows us a marriage with all its intangible dreams and mysteries, a town with its subtle web of lives acting one upon another. In "Familiar Heat", Mary Hood--of whom Pat Conroy has said, "She is not a good writer, she is a great writer:--gives us a world as miraculous and ordinary as the one we all inhabit, a world where both love and memory can perish and yet reflower in wonderful, totally unexpected ways.
Set on the Florida coast, in the small fishing town of Sanavere, Familiar Heat spans a few years in the lives of an assortment of characters, each precisely and vividly imagined - hardworking shrimpers, net menders, and fishermen; priests; shopkeepers; and a vibrant community of Cuban exiles still reliving - after thirty years - the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Against this background, we follow several interconnected marriages in various kinds of trouble. At the center is the marriage of Faye Parry, a beguiling young woman, and Vic Rios, captain of a Cuban charter boat and reformed rake ("that devil in a blue shirt", Faye's mother calls him). As the novel opens, Faye is on the way into the bank when she interrupts a robbery in progress and is taken hostage. What happens to her is brutal enough ("There is no fate worse than death", Faye assures herself during the ordeal), but it leads to a series of even more traumatic events, culminating in an accident that leaves her without memory of who she is. When her husband reverts to his old rakish ways, their estrangement seems irreversible: a man who wishes to forget he was ever married and a woman who hasn't a clue. If the town were not such a small one, if Mary Hood were not such a magical writer, that might be the end of it...
Industry Reviews
"I dived into Mary Hood's novel...and swam blissfully along in this generous-spirited narrative, set in Florida."
New Yorker - Kennedy Fraser (12/25/1995)
"I like best a novel like this one that transports me into a full and fully human world...It isn't often that so literary a novel is also so passionately positive about the human race, and leaves the reader smiling, proud to be one of its members."
Book Jacket - Doris Betts
"...Hood's skillful prose keeps the action from becoming inflated or false...a big, ambitious novel involving more than a dozen characters. Hood describes their pasts, then fits them like interlocking pieces into her story...They are completely unpredictable and utterly believable...Hood's prose is sometimes annoyingly clever...But 'Familiar Heat' is still a fine book to curl up with."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Janice Greene (12/10/1995)
"Despite Mary Hood's incandescent prose..., her first novel reads like a TV miniseries...Though Hood dishes up intrigue and action, she also digs beneath the surface to explore the relationship between memory and identity and the ironies that suffuse every marriage."
Washington Post Book World - Karen Angel (02/04/1996)
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