annewhitneypierce.com
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"Pierce writes lyrically and honestly in this powerful tale of life after tragedy, taking her time to fully develop characters and story."
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"Pierce's writing leaps from gritty descriptions of soil and fish to Chagall-like surreal dreams... Her strong sense of place and her attention to the nuances of Cambridge and Boston culture distinguish her writing. She grafts her theme of eccentric and unlikely families onto the legacy of Yankee-Irish tension unique to this historically rich landscape."
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In Pierce's patient hands, this story of survival and healing achieves poetic immediacy."
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"A touching and superbly-crafted tale of a young woman's quest to come to grips with tragedy and rebuild her life. Rain Line is a powerful, at times gripping, story of courage and coping, one that rightly professes faith in the indomitability of the human spirit."
GALAXY GIRLS: WONDER WOMEN
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WINNER OF THE WILLA CATHER FICTION PRIZE
"Galaxy Girls: Wonder Women is about fiercely brave and independent women, women who can be admired even in their most vulnerable moments ... Demonstrating a keen ear for unpretentious voices, Pierce uses these stories to spin richly populated yarns of divorce, abandonment, birth and love."
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"Sensitive, insightful and compelling are words used loosely by reviewers, but in the case of Pierce's stories, they are accurate descriptions for these ten stories of women who have come to extraordinary turning points in their lives.... The stuff of Galaxy Girls isn't earth-shaking high drama, but simply evocative storytelling, vividly and beautifully presented."
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"Anne Whitney Pierce's short stories celebrate sentiment and dramatize characters who discover their imagination in ordinary life itself. Her prose is deceptively clear, pure, 'spoken' yet finally beautiful, and filled with phrasing as vivid as the life she creates..."
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Winner of: Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, New Voices Award and Paterson Prize for Fixtion
-- Booklist
-- Publishers Weekly
P R E S S
-- New York Times Book Review
-- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
-- John Hawkes, author of The Cannibal and The Lime Twig
-- Foreword
-- Women's Review of Books
RAIN LINE
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'Down to the River' is a beautiful novel of a family both losing and finding itself ... Pierce's prose is fluent in lengthy and often wry descriptions that clearly paint her characters' temperaments, foibles, and class and generational peculiarities." --
"Anne Whitney Pierce has written a novel so richly imagined and finely observed that it casts a sort of spell. The extended Potts family—flawed and loveable, dissolute and striving, solitary and connected, real—will live long in the mind and heart."
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"Pierce's robust family saga... centers on the lives of... Chickie and Hen ... [first] cousins who weather the increasingly turbulent 1960's, which are filled with sex, drugs and political turmoil as the Vietnam war intensifies. Themes of fatherhood, brotherhood, and loyalty resonate throughout this atmospheric tale. Fans of Ann Patchett's 'The Dutch House' will savor this worthy entry to the genre."
DOWN TO THE RIVER
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"Some books you read, others you inhabit. 'Down to the River' is in the latter category. Anne Whitney Pierce writes about Cambridge, Mass. in the late 1960’s with the kind of rich, textured detail that’s missing from a lot of contemporary fiction. Without sentimentality or nostalgia, she brings the period alive with all of its political unrest, social anxiety, and sexual experimentation. More importantly, the Potts family becomes real and familiar, especially Chickie and Hen, the teenage cousins at the center of the novel. Their complicated relationship is a moving portrait of a particular stage of life in a specific time and place."
"'Down to the River' is a deeply absorbing family saga that unfolds in the vicinity of Harvard Square during the turbulence of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Anne Whitney Pierce captures those vanished days—the collapse of the old order, the sexual experimentation, the hovering threat of the war in Vietnam, the uneasy sense that anything might be possible—with uncanny precision and an empathy that does justice to both sides of the generation gap.”
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-- Elizabeth Graver, author of Unraveling and The End of the Point
-- Tom Perrotta, author of Election and
Little Children
-- Booklist
-- Portland Press Herald​
-- Midwest Book Review.
-- Stephen McCauley, author of My Ex-Life and The Object of My Affection
"Down to the River' showcases author Anne Whitney Pierce as an inherently gifted and impressively skilled novelist who pays attention to historical detail and the creation of naturally interesting characters and situations."