Summary and Reviews of The First Desire by Nancy Reisman

Media Reviews

Vogue A superb new writer . . . Reisman, whose sensually charged, often outright stunning style strongly evokes Virginia Woolf … proves herself a rare master of internal drama, able to isolate the moment that effects a sea change within a lifetime of compromise.

Janet Maslin - The New York Times Both lovely and heartbreaking in its vision of family ties at their most inevitable. She has on this earth one mother, the book says of Lillian and her punishing parent, a mother she wishes to forget, whose love is the color of bruises and who will, if you ignore her, haunt you into the next world. Ms. Reisman's power to haunt does not stretch quite that far, but it is formidable. It extends from the anxiety and uncertainty of loss, through the everyday wear and tear of family friction, to the reaffirmation of coming home.

Kirkus Reviews [A] grimly purposeful tale, where the fog of seething resentments (Niagara is a recurring symbol) can't entirely obscure sporadic gleams of familial love. Beneath the sepia tint, fully imagined lives. 

Publishers Weekly Reisman writes with beauty and precise imagery; she describes one character's personality as carp under ice, nibbling ancient disappointments. This realism, subtly laced with tenderness and compassion, distinguishes a novel whose addictive embrace continues after the last page has been turned. 

 Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto Nancy Reisman has written a book in which the sentences are so lush, the characters are so vivid, and the story is so compelling, I felt I had stepped inside the world she created and had taken up residence. I want to tell you how much I loved it there. The First Desire is not a book to be merely read. It is a book to be lived.

 Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of Fall on Your Knees and The Way the Crow Flies This is a stealth novel. The characters creep up on you, and before you know it you are inhabiting their world, attuned to intimate details, desires and desperate measures invisible to outside eyes. A lovely read.

 Anna Quindlen Reisman writes beautifully, a prose of restraint and grace. The achievement of this novel is that you are completely inside it from the moment you begin . . . This is a story that has the shape of life as it is truly lived.

 Julia Glass, author of Three Junes Nancy Reisman's first novel is an exquisitely detailed tapestry depicting a small era in the life of one family. How beautifully she writes about the subtle dramas that roil for decades among parents and siblings, about the ways in which the commitment of kinship can make people deeply, unavoidably intimate yet often just as blind to one another's vices, failings, and secret desires. It is a book written with the wisdom bestowed by heartbreak and the complex poetry of truth.