THREE-LEGGED HORSE (Bantam New Fiction) - Softcover

Abby Nash has the talent and training to be a concert violinist. Instead, dressed in peasant clothes, she drags her 12-year-old daughter, Hannah, to the bars where she performs songs like "Both Sides Now" with a band called Three-Legged Horse, and is obsessed by her husband, Zach, an opportunistic artist who wanders in and out of her life. When the folk-rock group dissolves in order to pursue individual goals, Abby is forced to confront her own passivity. She checks into a psychiatric hospital to cure herself of Zach and foists Hannah on her mother, a narcissistic soap-opera star. Here the focus shifts to Hannah, who seems almost inhumanly logical and mature among so many irrational adults. Hood's ( Waiting to Vanish ) plot is not wholly persuasive--Hannah's rapprochement with Zach as well as Abby's therapy are glibly effected. But Hood's economy is stunning--she can summon entire personalities and settings with a very few observations, while sparing her readers the arctic discomforts meted out by her post-modernist colleagues. 40,000 first printing; $40,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Three-Legged Horse is the folk group with which Abby Nash has played violin for ten years. It is also a symbol of the incomplete life she and daughter Hannah have led in their intermittent relationship with Abby's erstwhile husband, Zach Nash. Unable to face responsibility and afraid of love, Zach split after Hannah's birth, reappearing periodically both to exhilarate and deject them. The breakup of Three-Legged Horse prompts Abby to self-examination. Using flashbacks and alternating between Abby, Hannah, and, finally, Zach, the narrative relates the struggles of each during the summer Abby finally grows up. The portrayal of Abby's dependency upon Zach is more convincing than her transition to free woman, but Hood's third novel (following Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, LJ 5/15/87, and Waiting To Vanish ) is a finely crafted story of bittersweet love.
- M.J. Simmons, Duluth P.L., Minn.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.