The Seamstress — A Novel
My first novel, The Seamstresss was released in hardcover in 2008. In August of 2009, it will be released in paperback.
Below is a review from the Chicago Tribune Books Section about The Seamstress.
August 16, 2008
“The Seamstress,” by Frances de Pontes Peebles
With a keen sense of narrative, author transports readers to 1930s Brazil and the story of two sisters
By Alan Cheuse
It’s rare to find a first novel by a writer barely out of a workshop who isn’t looking inward. But “The Seamstress,” a glorious narrative production by recent University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and Chicago resident Frances de Pontes Peebles, turns our eyes toward the country of the writer’s birth—Brazil—and its barren northeast states and carries us back in time to the early 1930s. The story we fall into, as in John Gardner’s notion that reading a good novel is like falling in a continuous waking dream, gives us as good as we can get.
Two sisters, Emilia and Luzia, country girls and gifted seamstresses both, raised by their widowed aunt, find that their destinies initially diverge—and eventually converge—when their hilly hamlet of Taquaritinga do Norte, in the desolate state of Pernambuco, in the drought-ridden region of the backlands, is raided by a band of cangaceiros. (The cangaceiro was a cross between an anti-government rebel and a cowboy warrior. They traveled in packs, living off the impoverished but beautiful backlands when Brazil was becoming increasingly centralized and federalized.)
When the leader of the cangaceiros, the scar-faced peasant rebel known as the Hawk, abducts the more-than-willing Luzia, the plot rolls into action. She becomes seamstress to the rebels, and the Hawk later elevates her to the roles of mistress, wife and mother of his child. Emilia, meanwhile, enters into a marriage of convenience with a visiting city boy, a greatly troubled rich boy as it turns out, and moves to the port city of Recife.
As romantic as the story sounds—and Peebles has made an agonizingly romantic story in the best sense of the word—it all takes place against the nicely realized political turmoil of modernizing Brazil and the growing threat of Nazism in Europe.
But good stories don’t grow out of thin air. They begin with the writer’s keen sense of narrative—Peebles certainly has it—and sharp sense of observation. You can go to any page of the book and see that Peebles has that power in spades. Here, for example, is her initial description of the Hawk:
“On his right cheek was a scar, two fingers thick, which roped from the corner of his thick lips and disappeared beneath his ear. The scar’s flesh was lighter than his skin, like a crack on the top of a cake when the batter rises and splits the browned crust. The left side of his mouth opened in a smile, but the scarred side remained serious, paralyzed. . . . His fingers were short and thick, like a cluster of bananas.”
The baking metaphor seems appropriately female, and radically apt, as is the metaphor of the fingers like a cluster of bananas. Why? I ate this book up.
For more information, visit my Harper Collins author page.
Themocracy
The Seamstress was a christmas present my husband Dennis gave me last year. It was a lovely summer read which transported me to Brazil. I recommend this novel to other textile artists & imaginative readers. I quickly lent it to a friend & wish I still had a copy by my bedside.
I really hope you’re working on a new book, I’m going to be first in line to get it! I was offered a review copy by Harper Collins to promote it when it went paperback and I gushed on and on about it in my review.
“The seamstress” is the choice of the bookclub I belong to. we’ll discuss it sept 28th
I can hardly wait to hear what everyone thinks..i am sleep deprived because of reading this wonderful book…thank you for writing it.The descriptions have added so much to my reading life