The titular skating pond of Deborah Joy Corey"s long-awaited second novel is the site of a terrible accident that reveals the cracks in 14-year-old Elizabeth"s troubled family life. The daughter of an aloof painter and a frustrated Canadian beauty with an untapped gift for figure skating, Elizabeth spends winter afternoons watching her mother practice spins near their home in an isolated New England fishing village. When a stray hockey puck hits her mother in the forehead, Elizabeth once again finds herself on the sidelines. This time, however, she becomes a silent witness to the inexorable process by which a disfiguring facial injury not only destroys her parents" marriage but also robs her mother of sanity and life itself. Elizabeth survives the loss of her family only to enter a passionate and increasingly hostile relationship with an older man who is not unlike her self-absorbed artist father. Her inability to free herself from Frederick"s icy grip forms the central drama of this Gothic tale and ultimately leads her to make error in judgment with reverberations almost as disastrous as the accident on the pond. Elizabeth"s moving account of her parents" break-up is reminiscent of Corey"s first novel, Losing Eddie, in which a nameless nine-year-old records, with chilling dispassion, the collapse of her own family. In the latter half of The Skating Pond, however, Elizabeth"s voice suffers from a surfeit of romanticizing imagery, obscuring her motivations and those of other characters in a haze of purple prose. Corey remains a dazzling stylist but this novel lacks the precision that made Losing Eddie such an emotional tour de force. --Lisa Alward, Amazon.ca