Publisher's Synopsis
Part one of the story of a life, a family and a love affair with words, with life's mysteries and with a certain elusive desire. Ziggy Deer, born with the caul, born among seemingly impossibly attractive siblings, ventures out on the road to self-expression. Her search for meaning and her adventures along the way take her through many of life's ordinary experiences in the roller coaster car of her own imagination. Will she ever be able to compete? Will she lose her fear of being swept away on a wave of emotion like her sisters and end up wearing their faces and their shoes, or will she be able to put on the brakes at dangerous corners and live through it all to wear her own? Set in the suburbs of a South African city Ziggy's tale is one of laughter, hysteria, strange visions and the passion to be a writer. Words visit Ziggy's mind the way bees visit flowers and she has to decide which ones are useful, which are dangerous and which are just plain magical. As she grows from childhood in the early 1950s to adolescence in the sixties and early seventies she learns all about the power of words and visions while she wrestles with the perils of her fascination with a boy from her neighbourhood, tries not to be too intimidated by her ability to see family ghosts and watches her beautiful sisters get themselves tangled up in all the things that make her want to escape. As she struggles to flee the restrictions of Catholicism and social obligation she discovers another world in the feelings and epiphanies that are attached to inheriting the writer's power to experience the world through its manifold characters and situations. She experiences love and loss without being able to detach herself from the past. She finds a final link to the continuity of things in the connections she has made to people that she wants to keep with her as she journeys into the future and she knows that some of these people are living and some are dead and that if she wants to understand them and accept them as fellow travellers, she has to find the courage to acknowledge endings as part of the cycle of beginnings.
