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Title: Brilliant
Review: I love this book. The main character, Jennie, is one of the strongest female characters I have read in fiction - tough, smart and intent on re-inventing herself from the hippie child she once was. The novel weaves between the present - a road trip begun when Jennie's brother commits suicide - and the rich past of Jennie's hippie parents who invented their own new life in New Mexico. The prose is lyrical and lush, and each scene is so beautifully rendered that I felt I had lived it - the book draws you so closely into Jennie's world that, upon closing the book, I would sometimes find my own world a little disorienting.Most important, I felt that Jennie is engaged in a task that faces each of us - carving an identity within a family and a marriage, sorting through the past to find the pieces that have meaning and truth for the people we are now. The book is wise and rich in the ways of grief and forgiveness, family, and, most important, love. A rare and unalloyed pleasure.
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