Christopher Park

by Rosemary Clement

At age twenty-one, Cleveland born and raised, deeply Catholic Claire DeStefano accepts a job teaching in a parochial school in the hamlet of Christopher Park, Oklahoma. She knows she is fleeing a repressive family and a man she's sworn to marry, though she does not love him. What she does not realize is that she is also racing toward herself - sexual, caring, committed, introspective, fun-loving, loving, a woman of depth and complexity whom you as a reader, man or woman, will come to adore. Claire finds love in Christopher Park, not only for a man (perhaps the wrong surely an attractive one, though something of a liar) but for the children she teaches and for the town itself, and its citizens, both plain folk and zanies, and its atmosphere, which has about it a threat of disaster. When she goes back to Cleveland to face the life for which she was "destined," we feel her anguish over the pull between duty and the longings of the heart; when events call her inexorably back to Christopher Park (to reveal what these are would do injustice to a seamlessly constructed, amazingly suspenseful narrative), we are given new insights into the meaning of tragedy and joy.

210 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 1993