What a Piece of Work I Am

Peter Leroy

“[What a Piece of Work I Am] centers on the sultry Ariane, who had been the town bad girl in the 1950s. Baring the sexual secrets and bizarre events of her past to Peter, the platonic friend who is newly out of college and working as a teacher at their old high school when she first begins her story, Ariane pieces together a wild, fascinating tale based on her erotic history. Peter listens as Ariane, who is six years older and more worldly, recounts growing up lower-class and having sex with many boys while the good girls shunned and hounded her for it. He remembers vividly his own puppy love for this luscious older sister of his best friend, Raskol. . . . A rebel before her time, questing, daring yet bumbling in the back seats of guys’ cars, fearless to the point of foolishness, she remains resilient enough to pursue a twisting life’s odyssey that demonstrates her growing sophistication in matters of love and sex."
     Mark Ciabattari, Washington Post Book World

“Poignant. Dizzying. Wise. Mr. Kraft has created a heroine as complex as his narrative. [He] is a master at illuminating the shoals and shallows of a young person's heart. [His] work is a weird wonder, successfully mating tales from the kind of small-town life that hardly exists anymore with a never-ending examination of what it's like to create such a world.”
     Karen Karbo, The New York Times Book Review

“Beguiling. Vibrant. Kraft cooks up another treat.”
     Timothy Hunter, Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A prism of overlapping narrative frames.”
     Publishers Weekly

“Droll. Delighting. It conveys a sense of sheer play that a reader may not have experienced since building a fort in the back yard or settng up a dolls’ tea party.”
     The New Yorker

“It is easy to enter the spirit of oddly persuasive illusion. Poignant.”
     Michael Upchurch, San Francisco Chronicle

“Complex. Ambitious. It is a book that succeeds at two levels. It explores the delicate boundary between life and make-believe. Yet it is also a straightforward tale of a woman trying to break away from the trap that society and her own inertia have set for her. The delicate line between art and truth has never been more entertainingly explored.”
     Roger Harris, Newark Star-Ledger

“Sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, and always diverting.”
     Mark Munroe Dion, Kansas City Star

“We are — as we have come to expect from Eric Kraft — in the hands of a master.”
     Michael Z. Jody, The East Hampton Star

“One of the most engaging creations to emerge from Kraft's imagination.”
     Nicholas A. Basbanes, The Worcester Telegram & Gazette

“A flight of deeply imagined fancy.”
     Double Dealer Redux
     (Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society, New Orleans)

“One reacts to [What a Piece of Work I Am] on a personal level, delighting in the concreteness of its complexities, the evanescence of its construction, and in the playful purposefulness of its prose.”
     Frederic Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal

RECOMMENDED BY THE READER’S CATALOGUE

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR, 1994