I See You Everywhere (Glass)

I See You Everywhere
Julia Glass, 2008
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400075775


Summary
From the author of the best-selling Three Junes comes an intimate new work of fiction: a tale of two sisters, together and apart, told in their alternating voices over twenty-five years.

Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who years for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her daring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always been the favorite; yet as Clem puts it, “On the other side of the fence—mine—every expectation you fulfill...puts you one stop closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world—or plummet in very grand style.”

In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move farther apart. Louis settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is “like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.”

Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass’s previous work, I See You Everywhere is a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself. (From the publisher.)