"Take a lost shoe whose owner is never found, an old piano nobody wants:  add a young man with a horribly deformed leg and a young woman with perfect pitch that is too perfect, and Catie Jarvis weaves, with great respect and sympathy, a modern Cinderella story like the reader has never imagined. Her theme is the many consequences of love, which we see played out in numerous forms through two generations of family members and friends, moving ever closer to a truth that can be “measured.”  Who knew, for example, that the cry of the peacock is in G sharp? All leads to a strange and striking transformation scene, involving bird costumes, that the reader will long remember. Finally an excruciating decision must be made, based upon “what pushes a person from inside out,” by which time the reader, too, will be transformed.  I know that as one of those readers I was.  The Peacock Room is a beautiful and thoughtful, often lyrical love story to place among one’s favorite small novels."  

 

-John Laskey, fiction writer and founding chair of the MFA program in Writing at California College of the Arts