The Angel Carver Hardcover – May 25, 1993 by Rosanne Daryl Thomas 
 
A contemporary fable features Jack, a humble Brooklyn shoemaker; Lucille, a country girl who resembles Marilyn Monroe and steals Jack's heart; and Buddy, a modern Mephistopheles bent on destroying Jack and Lucille. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.
 
From Publishers Weekly
This very modern fairy tale, in which such timeless evils as envy, greed and cruelty are abetted by the latest advances in computer graphics technology, has the spare impact of both its literary antecedents and television cartoons. Four decades ago in the borough of Brooklyn, Angela, the beloved young wife of shoe repairman Jack Standini, descended into the subway on a trip to Manhattan and was never seen again. After Angela's disappearance ("She was just gone . . . lost like a glove or a sock or a dream, missing"), Jack kept to himself, fixing shoes by day and carving wood angels--exquisite and jewel-eyed, in all sizes--by night in the back room of his apartment. Then young, vulnerable Lucille enters his shop and, awakening Jack's interest in the present, soon moves into his bedroom (he sleeps on the sofa). Deciding to model herself after Marilyn Monroe, Lucille catches the eye of Buddy Lomax, a computer graphics techie (employed at Linotype Hell Graphics) whose obsession with recreating the dead Marilyn darkly mirrors Jack's devotion to his angels. Building on Buddy's monumental venality, Lucille's passivity and a murder in Jack's neighborhood, film-student Thomas propels the plot of this page-turning story in glancingly immediate, cinematic scenes. Innocence, constancy, artistic integrity and the evanescence of beauty are among the age-old themes addressed with vivid, compelling intensity in this quirky, high-flying tale. Under the pseudonym Prince Charming, Thomas wrote Complications.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
7.11
5.7*