Some Things Are Better Left to Saxophones

"The fact is, June Akers Seese refuses to lie. When her eye lights on something, she arrests it with a photographic infallibility that is simply breathtaking. She writes Hemingway's best declarative sentence through the lens of Kafka and the searing elegance of Joan Didion. Yet, on top of everything, she manages to be very, very funny-often excruciatingly so. Some Things Are Better Left to Saxophones, her latest novel, embodies vintage Seese and her all-too-human, all-too-like-us, unforgiving domestic landscape: inside our houses, insides our heads, inside our hearts."

-Joseph Bathanti, Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the
Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University


In this novel, June Akers Seese writes of two retired Detroit teachers and their retarded daughter, Melody, who lives with them and works at a downtown hotel folding napkins and polishing tabletops. Melody's sisters and brother have moved on. One sister to Japan to study languages and literature; another to a boarding house on the Wayne State University campus where she collects Master's degrees that go nowhere and earns her living as a sometimes waitress. Their brother has fled to Alaska where land is cheap and his carpentry skills valued. All approaching 40, these offspring have no plans to marry or return home. They are all trapped in a dream of escaping the responsibility of Melody when their parents die.