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Adult Books - Fiction - Crime Fiction - Thriller/Suspense
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Child of My Heart.
McDermott, Alice (author).
Dec. 2002. 208p. Farrar, hardcover, $22 (0-374-12123-0).
REVIEW.
First published September 15, 2002 (Booklist).
One of McDermott’s many gifts is her ability to portray adults, the poor clowns, as seen through a child’s or teenager’s clear-sky eyes, an illuminating and unsettling feat she performs with tender wit and quiet soulfulness in her exquisite fifth novel, the first since her National Book Award-winning Charming Billy (1998). McDermott has established early 1960s Long Island as a redolent fictional universe, “the kingdom by the sea” where ambitious working-class Irish Catholic escapees from Brooklyn keep an assessing watch over the island’s elite. Fifteen-year-old Theresa’s parents moved there to increase the odds that their exceptional daughter will attract a well-off husband. Meanwhile, this princess-in-waiting, who is every bit as shrewd as she is lovely, keeps herself busy during this eventful summer, her season of passage from girl to woman, by caring for her self-centered neighbors’ woefully neglected pets and children. Her sweet little city cousin, Daisy, a poetically minded stoic with unruly red hair and one of fiction’s most captivating girl spirits, is visiting, and the two share a magical world in which lollipops grow on trees and pretty plastic shoes have cosmic powers. But Theresa soon realizes that Daisy is ill, and the cousins’ intuitive complicity in concealing her condition infuses this magical novel with a profound poignancy. Resilient toddler Flora is Theresa’s primary babysitting responsibility, and of all the men who circle Theresa, aroused by and wary of her dawning sexuality and self-possession, Flora’s father, a famous abstract painter and still a hard-drinking womanizer at age 70, is the one this resourceful and pragmatic young woman is drawn to. Just as the calm and sparkling sea can conceal a tricky undertow, McDermott’s gorgeous novel is laced with sly literary allusions and provocative insights into the enigma of sexual desire, the mutability of art, death’s haunting presence, our need for fantasies, and the endless struggle to keep love pure. — Donna Seaman
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Features That Discuss This Work:
1. Works in Progress : Alice McDermott's Five Finger Exercise
2. Booklist Editors' Choice : Adult Books, 2002
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