Sleeping Beauties

Susanna Moore's new novel is set in a Hawaii whose shimmering beauty and melancholy traditions are at once seductive and dangerously hard to leave. Or so they prove for Clio, a thirteen-year-old runaway who is raised by her eccentric aunt Emma, a collector of legends, myths, and rites of their native island. Emma teaches Clio what it means to "swim out of the currents of time," to exchange her small past for a grand one. But when that same past begins to take on a crushing weight, Clio on impulse marries a well-known Hollywood actor, providing her with the promise of escape from her family and the entanglements of island life.

Sleeping Beauties charms us with its wit, enchants us with the suppleness of its language, and moves us with its tough-minded yet unabashed romanticism.