Into Thin Air

February 1, 1993
Toting road maps marked with favored routes, Lee often wanders along highway shoulders, a habit she fell into after her mother died of cancer and her father and his new wife locked this surly, seductive woman-child out of their hearts. At 17, she elopes from Philadelphia with Jim Archer, the blandest boy she knows. Their first night together, Lee is sure she'll ``never sleep with him lying so close beside her, staking so much claim.'' Mired in a stifling marriage, she has a daughter, whom she abandons at a Baltimore hospital in order to skip from state to state, fleeing her old life and searching for a new one. Her brittle shell finally cracks when a friend adopts an equally restless, frantically resentful four-year-old; Lee begins to search again, this time for the child she left behind. Leavitt ( Meeting Rozzy Halfway ) builds tension with a neatly contrapuntal narrative. Alternately viewing the world through Lee's eyes and through Jim's, she skillfully renders two realistically different accounts of an abortive relationship--one stark and unyielding, the other made more palatable by comforting lies. The melancholy story that ensues engages the reader with its essential truths, but remains largely superficial in that its unhappy endings are not only inevitable, but predictable.

January 1, 1993
Lee has been running all her life: first with her beloved athletic mother, then from home after her mother's death and her father's remarriage. Eventually Lee elopes with Jim Archer, a young pharmacy student. After giving birth to a girl, Lee runs away again, this time from the hospital. The novel follows the parallel lives of Jim in Baltimore as he struggles to rebuild his shattered life, and Lee as she finally lets herself put down roots in Madison, Wisconsin. Nine years after her disappearance, Lee's involvement in the life of a friend's adopted daughter makes her long for her own. Her reappearance in the lives of Jim, their daughter, and his new wife has powerful implications for all of them. While somewhat slow to start, this novel by the author of Lifelines ( LJ 5/15/82) and Meeting Rozzy Halfway ( LJ 1/15/81) ultimately involves the reader when it begins tracing Lee's growth. Not an essential purchase, but this will find an audience.-- Janet Boyarin Blundell, MLS, Brookdale Community Coll., Lincroft, N.J.

Copyright 1993 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 1993
Was it surprising that young Lee Archer vanished from the hospital just hours after her daughter's birth? At 14, Lee herself felt abandoned: first by her vibrant mother, Claire, who died an agonizing death from cancer, then by her father, Frank, with his withdrawal, his philandering, and his swift remarriage. All that follows--Lee's high school bad-girl act; her fondness for the open highway; her escape from Philadelphia at 17 with Jim Archer, the serious young man who loves her; and her stealthy departure from the Baltimore hospital, leaving pharmacy student Jim to cope with their nameless infant--seems inevitable. "Into Thin Air" sketches this past, and then follows both elements of the Archer household: Lee, on her exile's journey south to Richmond, Atlanta, and Lubbock, then north to Madison, where she begins to set down roots; Jim, through the loneliness of single parenthood, the obsessive pain of desertion, and the slow growth of a new relationship with Lila, a nurse who becomes his wife and Joanna's mother. Leavitt--author of "Meeting Rozzy Halfway" (1982)--skillfully and movingly traces the infinitesimally thin, immeasurably strong bonds connecting parents and children, husbands and wives, occasionally even ex-husbands and ex-wives. Her characters offer hope for atonement, acceptance, and redemption. ((Reviewed Feb 15, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)