Beauty and privilege, a charming, handsome husband and two promising young daughters, money, a beach house on the Pacific Jane has everything that Mattie thinks she wants. But Jane always works to damage what she's given. Mattie knows that better than anyone. But even she is caught off-guard when Jane leaves her whole life behind one broken morning before dawn. And it will take Mattie awhile to see that, by driving away, Jane has forced open the questions that have always hung in the air between them the ones that are hardest to answer questions about desire and envy and integrity. These are the issues of the heart that reveal themselves, not through the bold and dramatic gestures of a woman like Jane, but in even the briefest moments and the smallest of acts. With the same rich language and keen, compassionate eye that earned acclaim for her first novel, Lise Haines delves here into the forces that memory and touch raise in our lives and our most private hungers.
"Haines skillfully creates a tenuous idyll thats reminiscent of sections of Ann Patchetts Bel Canto or even Rebecca Wests The Return of the Soldier- here we have the same blissful menage, based on impossible circumstances that carry the seeds of their own destruction."
The San Francisco Chronicle
"The closed doors, crackling tension and heady atmospherics imbue 'Small Acts of Sex and Electricity' with a welcome subtlety that is often missing in novels about female friendships. And Haines, rather than succumb to the pitfalls of the token happy ending, has followed the wise advice of Chekov: 'When you want to touch a reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a backg
The San Diego Union-Tribune
"A lyrical, earnest second novel...touching...[a] sexy summer read."
