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The prose in this book is really first rate, and I enjoyed the rest of the book, but I'm still trying to figure out the painter-thing. I picked this book up at the library because I had read Charming Billy and really enjoyed it, but this one makes me not want to read anymore of Alice McDermott.
In one sense, little heartbreak happens. Early on, Theresa discovers the ominous bruises on her young cousin Daisy but decides not to search out their meaning. The neglected neighbor children, the Morans, crash through the summer but without great catastrophe. Even the privileged toddler, Flora, who has been essentially abandoned by her cosmopolitan mother, is still at an age where she can be easily pacified with a bottle of red juice. Tragedy and adulthood itself are postponed to the unwritten pages of life after the story's summer. However, in between, McDermott's lapidary prose hovers the inexorableness of Daisy's cancer death, of the Morans frustrated alcoholic future and of the lost and lonely adult Flora inevitably will become.
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day." Theresa quotes from her school's production of Macbeth throughout the novel and it is this ineluctable progression of time that forms the book's core sad note. For the narrator, an older Theresa looking back, childhood represents the finest point of life. It is a time of unlikely hopes, a time before the distasteful ambition, disappointed love and parental death of adulthood.
Alice McDermott's skill and restraint make CHILD OF MY HEART an anxious, lovely book, rather than the mawkish or sentimental one its story would have produced under the care of a less exquisite, sincere and deliberate writer. Many readers will find the craft itself, rather than the characters or the images, to be the most memorable quality of this book. One reads with the rare confidence that no scene has been carelessly included, that no sentence is meaninglessly clever. Each paragraph further compels the reader towards McDermott's elaborate argument and desired impact.
--- Reviewed by Rivka Galchen
This book can be called a bildungsroman, but unlike most rite-of-passage books which tend to take a sweeping view of a person's life, this novel takes a slice from a girl's life (a single summer, a few weeks) and examines how such a short moment transformed everything in the world for her.
The story is simplicity itself. Theresa is a fifteen year-old, a precocious babysitter, who looks after her young cousin, Daisy. On the surface level, not much goes on in the novel. There are adults who make up the moral landscape of the novel, and it's a tribute to McDermott's strength as a writer that much of this moral landscape is filled in through the absence of these adult characters... this vacuity that exists in the novel makes this suburban world of Theresa seem very lonely.
The climax of the novel (which I won't give away) is quite foreseeable, but this doesn't distract us from being engaged. The ending is as natural and inevitable as life itself, and although unspoken, it is quite clear that Theresa will never be the girl of fifteen again hence.
As I've mentioned, some of the writing is magnificent. The last fifty pages of the book achieve a kind of incandescence; I got one of those rare buzzes you only get from a special kind of writing. The prose alone can transport you. But at the same time, some nagging aspects of the novel got in the way of the story. It is clear that Theresa is fond of Daisy, but their relationship seemed too cloying at times. Undoubtedly, this is realistic; children can be attached to someone unequivocally. But it became repetitive... the constant 'poor daisy's' uttered, noxzema cream slathered on feet...
This is a coming-of-age tale as only McDermott can write it. Most of the denouement of the novel, Theresa's coming to terms with life and its gravity, the passing of youth, becomes apparent through unspoken terms. Sure, this book doesn't quite fully plumb the depths of the characters as her excellent novels from the past. Nevertheless, McDermott's insight is enlightening, and the book contains some of her most effortlessly passionate writing to date.
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-Borden Burns
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Brian McDonald's grandfather, son of Irish immigrants, joined the New York City police department in 1893. He was there during the height of Tammany Hall. He walked a beat as a patrolman and then rose quickly to seargent. He and his descendants each enjoyed the life of a copy and suffered because of bureaucracy, favoritism and the changing nature of the city.
In a way the story of these 3 generations is an excuse to tell the story of the NYC police department and the city it served. Though not a disciplined or complete history, this book quite effectively creates an anecdotal portrait that gives the reader a peek into a time and place not generally accessible.