The Ruins of California Sherrill, Martha

From Publishers Weekly With this eccentric coming-of-age story, Sherrill (My Last Movie Star) offers an interesting, if emotionally distant, window into California culture of the 1970s as well as an almost clinical examination of one extended family. Inez Ruin is a girl caught between suburban Los Angeles, where she lives with her mother, Connie (a former dancer), and her working class grandmother Abuelita, and San Francisco, where her sports car-driving, guitar-playing computer scientist father, Paul, parades a series of beautiful girlfriends. This unconventional family also includes a rich paternal grandmother (an artist's model in her glory days) and an adored hippie surfer half-brother, Whitman. Though Inez's evolution from passive observer to active participant in her colorful world is the story's driving force, the novel lacks a substantive structure. Sherrill describes Inez's world with reportorial precision, but the accumulation of detail doesn't always contribute to the narrative's momentum, giving the story a memoirish rather than a novelistic feel. By the end, however, the relationship between Inez and her father blossoms into the emotional center of this offbeat tale. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product Description Divided between the worlds of her secure ex-flamenco dancer mother's family and her father's exciting family, young Inez Ruin seeks to achieve a precarious balance in her California home throughout the course of the 1970s. By the author of My Last Movie Star. 35,000 first printing. From Booklist *Starred Review* Inez Garcia Ruin is a self-described "baton of a girl," passing from one divorced parent to the other--from her mother, Connie, a former flamenco dancer turned realtor in Southern California, to her glamorous father, Paul, something of a fixture in San Francisco society and scion of the old-money Ruin family. Set in California in the 1970s, this jaunty, beautifully written coming-of-age story is packed with larger-than-life Ruins--not only rakish father Paul but also half-brother Whitman, adventurous, resourceful, and perhaps doomed; redoubtable grandmother Marguerite, who teaches Inez how to ride, serve a proper tea, and understand that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything; and a mob of Kennedyesque cousins swarming around the family beach house in Laguna. And then there is Inez herself, moving between two worlds and belonging to neither, trying to grow up at a time and in a place so laid-back the point is not to try. Sherrill's re-creation of California in the '70s is impeccable, and her story of how a girl trapped in a theatrical family manages to transform herself from an observer into the star of her own life is absolutely irresistible. Michael Cart Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review Technically perfect characterization in a tale that explores an imperfect family. -- Kirkus Reviews, January 23, 2006 About the Author Martha Sherrill is the author of The Buddha from Brooklyn, a work of nonfiction, and My Last Movie Star, a novel.