Title: The quick and the dead
First published: 2000
Description: "Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One filled with convictions, another with loss, the third with a worldly pragmatism, they traverse an air-conditioned landscape eccentric with signs and portents - from the preservation of the living dead in a nursing home to the presentation of the dead as living in a wild-life museum - accompanied by restless, confounded adults.

A father lusts after his handsome gardener even as he's haunted (literally) by his dead wife; a heartbroken dog runs afoul of an angry neighbor; a young stroke victim drifts westward, his luck running from worse to awful; a sickly musician for whom Alice develops an attraction is drawn instead toward darker imaginings and solutions; and an aging big-game hunter finds spiritual renewal through his infatuation with an eight-year-old - the formidable Emily Bliss Pickless.

With nature thoroughly routed and the ambiguities of existence on full display, life and death continue in directions both invisible and apparent."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Teenage girls, Maternal deprivation, Orphans, Bildungsromans, Fiction, Suburban life, Female friendship, Arizona, fiction, Fiction, psychological, Friendship, fiction, Fiction, humorous, general, Fiction, humorous, New York Times reviewed
Places: Arizona, Phoenix (Ariz.)
LC classification: PS3573.I4496 Q53 2000