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Tim Welch is a popular history teacher at the Montague Academy, an exclusive private school in Brooklyn Heights. As he says, "I was an odd-looking, gawky kid but I like to think my rocky start forced me to develop empathy, kindness, and a tendency to be enthusiastic. All of this, I'm now convinced, helped in my quest to be worthy of Kate Oliver." Now, Kate is not inherently ordinary. But she aspires to be. She stays home with their two young sons in a modest apartment trying desperately to become the parent she never had. They are seemingly the last middle-class family in the Heights, whose world is turned upside down by Anna Brody, the new neighbor who moves into the most expensive brownstone in Brooklyn, sending the local society into a tailspin.
Anna is not only beautiful and wealthy; she's also mysterious. And for reasons Kate doesn't quite understand, even as all the Range Rover-driving moms jockey for invitations into Anna's circle, Anna sets her sights on Kate and Tim and brings them into her world.
Like Tom Perrotta, Peter Hedges has a keen eye for the surprising truths of daily life. The Heights is at once light of touch and packed with emotion and depth of character.
"Starred Review. Hedges brings a touch of farce into the many twists before the climax. Warm-hearted yet unsentimental, a smooth weave of marital and neighborhood dynamics." - Kirkus Reviews
"The plot tends toward busy, but Hedges keeps it under control, his sympathetically real characters holding down the novel's solid center." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Heights was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Hedges wrote both the novel and the screenplay What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and is the writer-director of Pieces of April and Dan in Real Life. His screenplay for About a Boy was nominated for an Academy Award.
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