Deborah Joy Corey’s The Skating Pond is a masterful and hypnotic exploration of the depths of human needs and desires. Told through the eyes of a young woman who has experienced more than her expected share of pain, this evocative novel explores the hidden truths of our lives with both candor and grace.

In the small fishing village of Stonington, Maine, the local pond is a hive of activity — in the summer, tourists flock to see the lilies in bloom; in the winter, it becomes the local skating pond, with boys playing hockey alongside pleasure skaters gliding around in circles. For young Elizabeth, going skating is less a pleasure than a chore, though watching her mother on the ice is a joy: “she looked like something from a fairy tale, a gazelle, thin-necked and elegant.” Elizabeth also relishes the knowledge that every swish of her mother’s skates is an act of defiance of her father, who sees his wife’s skating as decadence — her proper place is at home, taking care of her family. For Peter, an artist who only paints fishing boats, life is not about taking risks, but living in fear of the past, of the future, and anything that could possibly bring you harm.

One winter Saturday, both parents and Elizabeth head down to the pond — Peter with his sketchbook, Doreen wearing a sequined skating skirt that looks like neon when she spins. But in a random accident, a stray hockey puck hits Doreen squarely between the eyes and she crumples to the ice. With this event, Elizabeth’s life changes completely.

Horribly disfigured, Doreen begins to hide herself from the outside world, her condition worsening every day. And when Doreen’s husband disappears one night with his new art dealer, leaving only a note, Elizabeth is left to care for her mother alone. Then when Doreen dies, the 15 year old is left to raise herself. With only her new dog for company, besides the visits from the boy next door who comes to check up on her, she gets by on macaroni and tomatoes and stops going to school. Elizabeth loses herself in solitude, until one day she begins an affair with a stranger, a visiting architect named Frederick who is her father’s age. In their sexually intense relationship she tries to find rescue, to learn what crucial element is missing from her own life. But when he leaves, and leaves her pregnant, it’s as if the world’s been ripped out from around her again. The neighbour Michael steps forward to marry her — yet despite her best efforts to have a “normal” life and raise their family, she never feels that her life is complete, or recovers from her grief, or truly loves. It is only when Frederick reappears, a decade later, and tragedy once again threatens to tear her world apart, that Elizabeth is forced to come to terms with her heart’s truths.

Rich in images and language that will transport you into the emotional landscape of one small town, The Skating Pond is a heart-wrenching yet beautiful book, one that reaches into the core of human longing. Deborah Joy Corey explores how love and desire, belonging and grief, can shape our very beings — the effects rippling through her characters’ lives until tragic events send them flowing in new directions once again.

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“The Skating Pond is starkly beautiful, in both its emotional and physical terrain. Deborah Joy Corey is a magical writer and her new novel burrows deep under the skin.” -- Richard Russo

“Wrenching in its humanity and universal in its themes. A very fine book and Deborah Joy Corey is an exceptional writer.” -- Alistair MacLeod

“In her spare, etched novel, Deborah Joy Corey demonstrates how the patience and fortitude of love can flourish on the harshly beautiful coast of Maine.” -- Frederick Busch

“Corey is a dexterous wordsmith and each sentence reads like it was lovingly crafted, and her settings are described in luxurious detail. . . . Often, Corey is perfect.” -- The Edmonton Journal

“An island village off the coast of Maine is the landscape for a love story as rocky as the coast itself. . . . A sensitive novel, rich in scenic detail and in the turbulence of human longings.” -- Elizabeth Hardwick

“I have much admiration for Corey the wordsmith: She is a gifted, powerful writer whose feet are planted firmly in the tradition of the ‘literary novel’.… There is much good here…. Beautiful writing.” -- National Post

“The Skating Pond masterfully illuminates for the reader a life that oscillates between what will last, what will satisfy, and a life of longing.” -- New Brunswick Reader

"This is a stunning book, full of the kind of terrible beauty that can grow out of loneliness and seclusion... Corey's leaps from sentence to sentence seem to convey something transcendent, oracular." -- Books in Canada

"The Skating Pond resonates with the same dark struggle for love and belonging as Charles Dickens' Bleak House. It is a chilly reminder of the value of love." -- Chatelaine

"The Skating Pond grips from the first sentence and does not let go." -- The Providence Sunday Journal

"The way The Skating Pond conjures up a landscape so palpable it might as well be an actual character reminds me of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Like Brontë's, Deborah Corey's vision is dark and unsettling... but redeemed by moments of grace." -- Frances Kiernan

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Deborah Joy Corey was born and raised in Temperance Vale, New Brunswick, the sixth of seven children. Rural New Brunswick would also become the setting for her first novel, Losing Eddie. Narrated through the eyes of a young girl, the book received extensive praise and won the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award. The Skating Pond is Corey’s second novel, and she is also the author of numerous articles and stories. Her writings have been published in such literary journals as Ploughshares, Carolina Quarterly, Crescent Review, Image, and Grain. Today, she lives in a small coastal village in Maine with her husband Bill and their daughters Georgia and Phoebe.

While writing The Skating Pond, Deborah Joy Corey drew not only on her experiences in her current hometown — which is not far away from the actual town of Stonington, Maine — but also her youth in New Brunswick. For her, the act of telling stories has always been associated with family and with an intense sense of place. As she’s said in one interview, “Most of my characters come from my home place. My parents were both from a very strong oral tradition. When we sat down at lunch and dinner, we’d tell old stories over and over again. When I was growing up, nobody had written many stories about New Brunswick so you relied on your family for those stories.” And in creating her narrator, Elizabeth, Corey was able to draw on what it feels like to be a teenager in a small maritime town. “I could definitely relate to Elizabeth in her desire to leave or her desire to know what was beyond the next hill. Also to her restlessness.” Corey herself moved away from home when she was seventeen, to work as a model in Toronto.

In The Skating Pond, Deborah Joy Corey explores what happens to small-town families when tragedy strikes, and follows the life of Elizabeth in particular, as she tells her own story. As Corey has explained, it was important to look at not only the major events that happen when Elizabeth is a teenager, but also how her experiences play out over her life: “I wondered what happens to a girl in a place she can’t leave. I was also interested in how we are shaped by the smallest things, accidental things. I like to write about the small things that make us who we are.” And it is the uncovering of such details, particularly in the lives of women, that drives much of Corey’s storytelling: “It’s important for me to try to be truthful about motherhood, sexuality, coming of age, to write frankly about these things, because that’s the kind of story I’m drawn to, myself. Women have multi-layered lives.”

Since the publication of The Skating Pond, Corey has continued to write short stories (her first love) and has started a third novel. Most often, Corey devotes just two to three hours each morning to writing, then leaves her work for another day — as she’s told one interviewer, “The rest of life is for living.”

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