Becket Royce

                             " Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle," says Ruthie, the novel's narrator. The same may be said of Becket                                          Royce's subtle, low-keyed reading. The interwoven themes of loss and love, longing and loneliness—"the wanting never subsided"—                                    require a cool, almost impersonal touch. Royce narrates natural and manmade catastrophe and ruin as the author offers them: with a                                  sort of watery vagueness engulfing extraordinary events...  she expresses Ruthie's story without any irksome effort to sound childlike, and she avoids the pitfall of dramatizing other characters, such as the awkward sheriff, the whispery insubstantiality of Aunt Sylvie or the ladies bearing casseroles to lure Ruthie away from Aunt Sylvie and into their concept of normality." Publisher's Weekly, October 2005