Description: A former library book with the usual identifiers in a protective glossy dust jacket covering. Dust Jacket has some edgewear present. -, Hard Cover, Very Good / Very Good.
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Ex-library. mylar jacket, normal library markings, has light external smudges, great reading condition. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. 268 p. Audience: General/trade.
Description: Very Good. A stated first edition, first printing with full number line. This is a nice hardcover ex-library copy with typical markings and attachments. Binding is tight and square. Text is clean and bright. DJ is VG. Careful packaging and fast shipping. We recommend PRIORITY MAIL for even faster delivery!
Description: Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. Hardcover. Steerforth Press, 1997. 1st Edition/1st Printing. Fine Book in Near Fine Dust Jacket. Price Intact. Light shelf wear to Jacket. Overall, a clean and tight copy to add to a collection or read and enjoy. Dust Jacket protected with a new archival cover. Bubble wrapped and shipped promptly in a box.
Description: Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. First American Edition. Very slight bumps to board corners. Otherwise very nice in unclipped Dust Jacket with one slight wear touch..
Description: Like New in Like New jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Signed by Author Stated first American edition/second printing before publication. Signed by Barbara Gowdy on title page with no inscription. A collectible copy of this important novel.
Description: Very Good. 1883642337 First American edition hardback. All pages bright and clear except for a few library marks. The dust jacket is great under protective plastic.
"I knew I was in for a treat when I opened my copy of the new edition of Barbara Gowdy's 1995 novel Mister Sandman, and saw that the foreword was written by Katherine Dunn, author of the weird and wonderful Geek Love. I wasn't disappointed.
Set in Toronto in the late fifties through the early seventies, Mister Sandman is the story of the Canarys, a most unusual family. Father Gordon works at a publishing house, editing potboilers. He's quiet and deep, and he--like everyone in the novel--has a secret. A very big secret. Mother Doris is an habitual liar ("the truth is just a version" she famously says) who's built a past as an actress and now raises three children. She has a secret, too. Sonja is the eldest of the three girls, and her secret is that the youngest of the three is her daughter. Marcy is the middle girl, smart and aware. And then there's Joan.
The eternally innocent Sonja is seduced--or raped?--by a man we later discover to be extremely important to others in the family. Doris immediately determines that they must go to her great aunt in Vancouver, where Sonja can have the baby and no one will be the wiser. There is never any thought of not keeping the baby and raising her as Doris and Gordon's third daughter.
Joan is lovely: tiny, delicate, and pale, she is physically an eternal child . She doesn't talk or write, but she has the gifts of music and insight. Joan is the literary descendant of Gunter Grass's Oskar, who at the age of three wills himself not to grow any bigger, and of Irving's Lily Berry, who just stops growing; like them, despite her tiny stature she has emotional, spiritual, and intellectual capacities far beyond her apparent years--and far beyond those of everyone around her as well.
Joan is, for most of the book, the secret keeper of the family. All are drawn to her and each feels the need to confide in her. She knows all of the lies and the deceptions, she knows the joys, the pleasures (both conventional and illicit), she knows what everybody wants. In the end, it seems, she knows what they need, too, although they don't know it themselves. And, as almost always happens, the secrets will be told.
Words and language are very important in Mister Sandman. Joan speaks a language of soft clicks and hisses and moos and meows, perfect imitations of the noises she hears around her and mostly intelligible to her family. Sonja hears her mother's declaration that "the truth is just a version" as "the truth is just aversion." The words pour out of Gordon and Doris and Marcy and even the dull Sonja, and Joanie absorbs them all. What she does with them in the end is her gift to her "darlings," her family.
Mister Sandman is magical--dreams are prophetic, transformative, sometimes shared by more than one person. It's tragic, full of betrayal, despair, revelation. It's funny. It's excruciatingly erotic, often at the most awkward of times. Occasionally the novel verges on being cloyingly quirky, but there's always just enough nastiness lurking at the edges to pull it back into the realm of the weird and the wonderful."
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