The blue hour

What is The Blue Hour? It's when Father doesn't Know Best, it's the morning after "Queen for a Day," it's when the center cannot hold for a 1950s "nuclear family" in Meander, Illinois. It's 1959, as America gets ready to say good-bye to Mamie Eisenhower and hello to Jackie Kennedy. For ten-year-old Penny Powell, it's the hour after sunset, and 1959 is the year she takes on the job of family barometer, absorbing for later reflection every rise and dip in the homefront weather. And the weather is bumpy, for 1959 is the year her parents, Bob and Dotty, buy a house that matches Bob's ambitions - if not his pocketbook ... and Dotty reinvents herself to keep up with the Joneses. Penny watches as her father loses yet another "fortune," as her mother is lured into a dangerously seductive social circle, as her older sister heads for amphetamine addiction, anorexia, and the wrong crowd. It's a risky, nervous time for the little mood manager who feels responsible for keeping the family peace. But what can she do when her father feels entitled to lord it over her mother with those not-so-subtle hints about Dotty's body (not to mention her brain)? Grown up, Penny will remember everything about the year that was so tightly wound around her father's hard-driving ambition and bad judgment that it all broke loose and spun out of control. She'll remember it so well that she'll finally figure out what really did happen. And, in this stunning debut by Elizabeth Evans, we get to watch as the light dawns about what Penny's mother was doing behind all of their backs - probably even her own. The Blue Hour shines the soft light of dusk on a 1950s family's metamorphosis from innocuous and innocent into something quite different ... and quite tragic.