Dale Loves Sophie to Death (33 page)

It was one of those singular moments that is seared into a collective sensibility. In that instant when simultaneously Lily stepped into the garden on her father’s arm and Warren Scofield clutched his heart, there was a redefinition of Lily. That day in 1913, at just a little past two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, June 28, Lily accumulated real consequence in the town of Washburn. Within the blink of an eye she acquired a reputation for possessing unparalleled charm and remarkable, if unconventional, beauty. It was the very same moment, of course, that Warren Scofield was privately acknowledged by many of the wedding guests to have suffered a broken heart.

“Arrestingly elegant.”—A
NNE
T
YLER
,
New Republic

S
elected as the year’s best first novel—and everywhere hailed for its narrative richness and emotional power—Robb Forman Dew’s astonishing debut illuminates the varieties of romantic love and the unexpected rewards of family life as it tells the story of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their three young children return to her midwestern hometown to spend a summer.

“A precocious debut.…Mrs. Dew can convey, with a skill matched by few writers today, the quick, peculiar shifts in feelings that we experience, moment to moment, day by day.”

—M
ICHIKO
K
AKUTANI
,
New York Times

“Like Virginia Woolf, Robb Forman Dew reaches into the flow of daily life to break open a single moment. She captures beautifully the shift and flux of feelings, friendships, perspectives, the child in the adult and adult in the child.”

—J
EAN
S
TROUSE
,
Newsweek

“The rewards of
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
are quiet but rich, and prove once again that in fiction there are no automatically compelling subjects. There are only compelling writers.”

—K
ATHA
P
OLLITT
,
New York Times Book Review

“Robb Forman Dew has shown a keen eye for the untidy domestic minutia that is the very sinew of American middle-class life, and a generous understanding of the heart that beats within it: that odd, elastic, irreplaceable organ we call family.”

—R
OBERT
C
OHEN
,
Los Angeles Times

OBB
F
ORMAN
D
EW
is also the author of the novels
The Time of Her Life, Fortunate Lives,
and, most recently.
The Evidence Against Her,
as well as a memoir.
The Family Heart.