A Trick of Nature

Greg Goodman is a very ordinary guy--a not-very-ambitious school teacher and football coach who takes his attractive wife Patty their twin adolescent daughters and the comfortable ease of their suburban routine for granted. Until lightening strikes--both literally and figuratively--as Greg runs a pattern with his junior varsity team during a muggy August practice and fifteen-year-old Timothy Phelps is directly struck. This crisis threatens to unravel all the strands anchoring Greg to his normal habits of being. When Timothy''s mother a stripper and addict who abandoned Timothy as a child enters the mix Greg discovers his own complicated and misguided longings.As in her debut novel Suzanne Matson employs crisp clean writing...[and] compassionately drawn characters (New York Times Book Review) to create a gripping story about the nature of love trust family and marriage. Set in a seemingly safe world of split-levels and carefully tended lawns A Trick of Nature powerfully captures the characters'' emerging self-awareness as they are forced to test the assumptions they hold about themselves and the connections that bind them.