Delicately rendered characters inform a richly textured family portrait.
A family's myths become a treasured legacy.
“How is a person made?” the young Katherine Stewart asks her older sister, Tommy. “I mean a life,” she adds, “growing up, understanding who you are and what you want. How does that happen?” That is the essential, vexing question that pervades McPhee’s thoughtful, gently told novel about the ways a family’s past shapes each generation. Tommy’s granddaughter Isadora finds the stories irresistible: A writer, she bases her novels on biographies of real people, just as McPhee has done here, drawing on her own family history. Central to the novel are Tommy and Katherine, cowed by poverty, neglected by their impetuous mother, Glenna, and longing to escape a circumscribed life. Throughout their childhood, they find themselves “elaborating and embellishing” colorful family fables, handed down by Glenna, until both felt that they “had lived not only their brief lives, but also in memories that began long before they were born.” Their own lives change dramatically in 1910 when Glenna leaves her adulterous husband, taking her daughters from their home in Ohio to Montana, where she cajoles and flirts her way into being hired as a teacher—pretending to be single, soon foisting her girls on a kindhearted childless couple. She returns after 2 years, sweeping up her daughters once again to accompany her as she continually reinvents herself. As the sisters grow up, they confront the question Katherine asked as a child: how to know who you are. McPhee underscores her characters’ evolving identities by playing with names: Tommy was born Thelma; Katherine calls herself Kate and, later, Pat; and these names, too, change—sometimes confusingly—as the narrative spins out and each sister grapples, more or less successfully, with the possibility of self-creation. “Sometimes it feels good to pretend,” Tommy reflects, “to be the person you desire, to believe you can have what you please, that what you say is the truth.”
Delicately rendered characters inform a richly textured family portrait.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7957-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.
After a loss, a young British woman from a Ghanaian family reassesses her responsibilities.
Her name is Maddie, but the young protagonist in George’s engaging coming-of-age novel has always been known to her family as Maame, meaning woman. On the surface, this nickname is praise for Maddie’s reliability. Though she’s only 25, she works full time at a London publishing house and cares for her father, who’s in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease. Maddie’s older brother, James, has little interest in helping out, and their mother is living in Ghana and running the business she inherited from her own father. When she needs money, she always calls Maddie, who shoulders these expectations and burdens without complaint, never telling her friends about her frustrations: “We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently” is an idea that's ingrained in her. Her only confidant is Google, to whom she types desperate questions and gets only moderately helpful responses. (Google does not truly understand the demands of a religious yet remote African-born mother.) But when Maddie loses her job and tragedy strikes, she begins to question the limits of family duty and wonders what sort of life she can create for herself. With a light but firm touch, George illustrates the casual racism a young Black woman can face in the British (or American) workplace and how cultural barriers can stand in the way of aspects of contemporary life such as understanding and treating depression. She examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing hero here: You can’t help but root for Maddie’s emancipation. Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.
A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2502-8252-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists.
It’s time to harvest the cherries from their Michigan orchard, but the pandemic means that Joe Nelson; his wife, Lara; and their daughters, Emily, Maisie, and Nell, must pick all the fruit themselves.
To lighten the lengthy, grueling workdays, and prompted by the recent death of world-famous actor Peter Duke, the girls press Lara to tell them about her romance with Duke at Tom Lake, a summer stock company in Michigan, and her decision to give up acting after one big movie role. Lara’s reminiscences, peppered by feisty comments from her daughters and periodic appearances by her gentle, steadfast husband, provide the foundation for Patchett’s moving portrait of a woman looking back at a formative period in her life and sharing some—but only some—of it with her children. Duke flashes across her recollections as a wildly talented, nakedly ambitious, and extremely crazy young man clearly headed for stardom, but the real interest in this portion of the novel lies in Patchett’s delicate delineation of Lara’s dawning realization that, fine as she is as Emily in Our Town, she has a limited talent and lacks the drive that propels Duke and her friend and understudy Pallas. The fact that Pallas, who's Black, doesn’t get the break that Duke does is one strand in Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web, which also enfolds the nature of storytelling, the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice. Lara’s daughters are standouts among the sharply dawn characterizations: once-volatile Emily, now settled down to be the heir apparent to the farm; no-nonsense veterinarian-in-training Maisie; and Nell, the aspiring actor and unerring observer who anticipates every turn in her mother’s tale. Patchett expertly handles her layered plot, embedding one charming revelation and one brutal (but in retrospect inevitable) betrayal into a dual narrative that deftly maintains readers’ interest in both the past and present action. These braided strands culminate in a denouement at once deeply sad and tenderly life-affirming.
Poignant and reflective, cementing Patchett’s stature as one of our finest novelists.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780063327528
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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