An Invisible Sign of My Own (Hardcover)

By: Aimee Bender;

Language: English

Quality: Like New

Genre: Novel,

ISBN: 9780385492232

SKU: BE500326922696

Pages: 264

Description: The incandescent first novel by the author of the acclaimed The girl in the Flammable Skirt. With her stunning debut collection of stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender showed herself to be "a writer who makes you glad for the very existence of language" (San Francisco Chronicle). The book was a sensation; it spent seven weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, received ecstatic reviews nationwide, and established Aimee Bender as one of the freshest and most original voices in American fiction. In An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender exceeds her early promise. She gives us the story of Mona Gray, a second-grade math teacher who has just turned twenty -- a number which, like all numbers in her life, seems to have a profound significance. Mona lives her life under the shadow of her father's long, weird, unnamed illness and her own bizarre compulsions. She excels at music, running, and sex, but ceases each activity just at the moment enjoyment becomes intense: Mona is "in love with quitting". Only numbers provide the order and beauty she craves. "Mix up some numbers and you get an equation for the way the wind shifts or an axiom for the movement of water, or the height of someone, or for how skin feels. You can account for the softness. You can explain everything". With construction paper and magic markers Mona arranges her classroom into "a beautiful museum of numbers", but that could also describe her life: a collection of oddities, a static place, a hushed and insular world where disruption is unwelcome. Then the science teacher arrives, with burn marks on his fingers and a genius for teaching children the symptoms of scurvy, and Mona's strange andtidy universe is threatened by love, the supreme disorder. In her luminous, pitch-perfect prose, Bender conjures a dream world much like our own, a fairy tale grounded in a penetrating sense of what moves the human heart.