The Miss America Family

Oct 24, 2024 12:23 PM

Author:Julianna Baggott

The best day of Pixie's life was the day she won the Miss New Jersey beauty pageant. Her dreams stretched in front of her: a Miss America could go anywhere, be anyone. Fame and fortune were at her fingertips - until she fell pregnant. Now, the mother of a teenager, on her second marriage, she is beset by memories of her glittering career.

Ezra, her sixteen-year-old son, notices none of this. It's the start of the long summer holiday and his main preoccupation is the girl next door and his quest to lose his virginity. Engaging and honest, he tells his own story of what it means to be the child of a woman whose American dream went nowhere.

Soulful and mordantly funny in the vein of American Beauty, Pixie and Ezra unfold a story of the American family that is at once touching and fiercely honest.

Reviews

Baggott explores contemporary "civilized" behavior and the imperfections of a "perfect American family" with wit and grace

—— Publishers Weekly

Julianna Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart

—— Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of EMPIRE FALLS

An accomplished and charmingly messy tale of love and redemption

—— Kirkus Reviews

A novel of extraordinary range, yet of extraordinary minuteness, that manages never to sacrifice one quality for the other

—— Financial Times

Williams has fashioned an always engaging, psychologically convincing work of fiction - a consistent and well-realized portrait

—— New Yorker

A highly imaginative account of the life and times of Augustus-a brilliant novel

—— Library Journal

A brilliant epistolary novel about Octavius Caesar and ancient Rome...all three [of John Williams'] novels show a similar narrative arc: a young man's initiation, vicious male rivalries, subtler tensions between men and women, fathers and daughters, and finally a bleak sense of disappointment, even futility.

—— New York Times

Exquisite...brims with great lines

—— Chicago Tribune

A vividly imagined re-creation of classical Rome, but its intuitive grasp of the experience of immense power makes it an unusual, and superior, novel

—— Boston Globe

There could be no better year than 2014 to rediscover this one

—— Mary Beard , Times Literary Supplement

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