THE PLACE OF SAPPHIRES

Stacey Weir's attempt to find herself takes her back and forth in time and memory, provides a highly personal, sometimes plaintive, sometimes desolate account of a woman alone- dependent and despondent. Death is an even stronger factor than life; her father's death is the first abandonment and she is salvaged by Gil, asual, abrupt and attractive, and she marries him. Gil's death, in an automobile accident, plunges her into months of despair; she drinks, she has an affair with Cammie, a scrounger and an intellectual fraud who would marry her for Gil's money, and she breaks it off in time. She makes a search for the mother she had never known, and repudiates her. And she falls in love with a married man and finally has the strength to send him back to his family and to take up her own life- and her painting- again... Occasionally overwritten, this is for women who enjoy an expansive probe of outspoken emotions.