Word: angellic
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...early summer in a nameless Connecticut hamlet, and the Irises are wilting. Like the members of so many families who inhabit the world of contemporary fiction, those in the Iris clan are profoundly disconnected from one another. When we meet them in Angel Angel (Viking; 211 pages; $19.95), April Stevens' intelligent and moving first novel, they seem withered by their inability to achieve the closeness they yearn...
Emma most frequently plays the deceased member of the trio. Although in life she was a trial (like her husband), in death she became a perfect angel. It seems inevitable that Hardy would work this transformation on her behalf, given his rueful temperament. His poems are brooding, self-chiding. His life seems a variation on the biblical injunction that a man must lose himself to find himself. In Hardy's case, anything and everything had to be lost before its value could be found. He was a man for whom happiness was always just around the corner -- the corner...
...made sure he was in the right place. Again he fatally shot the receptionist -- Leanne Nichols, 38 -- and again he kept on shooting. It was only when a security guard returned fire that the rifleman dropped his bag and fled. Yet even in retreat, he kept his composure. Says Angel Rodriguez, who witnessed the shooter's escape: "He was completely calm and took his time. He kept the gun low on his hip and ran backwards, firing at least five shots. He was trying to scare people, and it worked...
...Mother and sisters made her ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again, seeing with grateful eyes the beautiful serenity that soon replaced the pathetic patience that had wrung their hearts so long, and feeling with reverent joy that to their darling death was a benignant angel, not a phantom full of dread...
Well, maybe not a witch, but some species of ethereal being. A dark angel, perhaps. Though at 23 Ryder is a prime icon of the post-teen set -- more than one writer has called twentysomethings the Winona Generation -- there is a quality in her dark, Walter Keane-eyed beauty that pulls her out of her time and into the crinolined past. No modern actress has her watchfulness, her fiery reticence, her gift of girlish blush and fluster. Nobody else even tries to monitor the intelligent, expectant heart beating in a virgin's breast. The true Ryder heroine is a gentle...