Summary and Reviews of Edges by Leora Skolkin-Smith

Media Reviews

 Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble and Coming Back to Me Where, and how and to whom do we really belong? Skolkin's brilliant debut novel is a hypnotic meditation on the ever-changing boundaries of love and need. A coming of age story of the bond between a young American and her powerful mother, etched in a wartime Mideast as shifting and dangerous and mysterious as the Israeli desert.

 Katharine Weber, author of The Little Women and The Music Lesson Edges is an elegant and moving novel. Leora Skolkin-Smith has that rare gift of the writer who can convey the sensibility - the essence of a place and its people - with precision and clarity. A provocative debut.

 Mark Mirsky, writer and founder of Fiction Magazine, and Professor of English at City College of New York. In Edges Leora Skolkin-Smith skillfully tells the story of a girl of fourteen in the wake of her father's suicide, brought abruptly by her distraught mother from a comfortable suburban Westchester to the harsh terrain of a young State of Israel. The girl is caught in the maelstrom of political claims between Israel and a West Bank, still part of the Kingdom of Jordan. The turmoil both of the girl and her mother is graphically detailed as they struggle to define themselves in the light of a haunted past and present. The poetry of the girl's sexual awakening ripples through many pages, softening the fierce realities of the conflict between Arab and Jew. The pages evoke as well the memories of a shared land, and the mother's childhood growing up in an old Jerusalem before the city was separated by physical barriers, the religious, cultural, divide between Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author's vivid sense of landscape, her gift for identifying with both mother and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the novel a unique sense of balance and brings the reader, regardless of political conviction into sympathy with this portrait of a vanished Jerusalem. Edges is a powerful evocation of lost worlds which it is a joy to wander back into.

 Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo King Sings Songs of Love Edges is an elegantly written, quite moving novel that has a lot to say about love, identity, history and the meaning of nationality. The book is worth reading alone for its superb language, but it is gripping and unforgettable as well in its story telling and evocation of place and emotions. It is a wonderful novel by an author with a quite accomplished voice and style, one well deserving a wide and receptive audience.

 Philip Graham, Director, Creative Writing Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Edges takes the reader to an Israel before the high walls formed a border, when instead metal wires hung like "hosiery lines" across the land...Here, Skolkin-Smith's young heroine tries to shake off her father's suicide and her mother's mourning by making an escape with the missing son of an American diplomat...Skolkin-Smith, in clear, burnished prose, fuses personal and political rifts into an exhilarating debut novel.