justin

While there were things I didn’t like about this book, particularly at the beginning, I have to join the chorus of praise for it. This is one of the most deeply moving books I’ve ever read and it has stayed with me long after I closed the cover.

Ora and her damaged friend, Avram, are walking the length of the country. She’d meant to go with her son, Ofer, but he’s volunteered to continue his military service for one more month so he can participate in a big operation. In her fear for him, Ofer resorts to magical thinking: if she’s not home to be notified, then he cannot be harmed. During the walk, she reconstructs Ofer’s life for Avram who has never met him and knows nothing about him. Ora’s husband, Ilan, has left her and to make matters worse their older son, Adam, has chosen to go with him.

Some people in one of my online reading groups so detest prologues that they refuse to read a book with a prologue. I can see their point, as I’ve mentioned before here and here. This novel almost pushed me into the never-read-a-book-with-a-prologue camp. 47 pages long, the prologue took me over a month to read because I kept putting the book down in frustration. Normal punctuation is missing, as are dialogue tags (he said, she said), sending me backtracking to try to figure out who is speaking. Most frustrating, though, is the lack of clarity about the characters, the situation, and the world they live in.

Three teenagers—Ora, Avram, and Ilan—are alone in a hospital during a war. I admit that I misunderstood when and where we were through almost the whole prologue. The characters seemed flat, almost caricatures, and their speech and interactions surreal. The only thing that kept me going was Deborah's strong recommendation. Once the story finally began—a straight-forward, realistic story set in the present-day with dialogue tags and punctuation—it did capture and hold my interest.

This is a book about connection: between mother and son, husband and wife, brothers, friends. It is also about the connection between people and their land, the physical land itself and their country. The writing really brought home to me what it feels like to live in a country as tenuous as Israel. Avram says, ” ‘I don’t think the Americans or the French have to believe so hard all the time just to make America exist. Or France.'” But of all the connections, it is the one to the child that goes deepest. Ora tries to convey to Avram the entirety of Ofer’s life, which of course includes her life and Ilan’s and Adam’s and what they all mean to each other, in the process drawing Avram into the family.

Although I enjoyed the descriptions of the landscape, the mountains and rocks and flowers, I suffered through the wrenching emotions. This is not an easy book to read. I found myself shrinking from picking it up, not sure I had the emotional stamina for another bout. But Grossman varies the pace well, with the many jumps in time expertly handled. From a writer's point of view, I recommend this book as a textbook on how to employ flashbacks. From a reader's point of view, I cannot recommend the book highly enough as an experience that will leave you with a deeper understanding of what it means to live in this world.

I respect the experience Grossman brings to this book. Much of the writing here is profoundly moving, conveying the emotional journey that is so much harder than any physical journey. I especially appreciate the way he captures the special relationship Israelis have with their land, so much more immediate, intense and conflicted than other citizens have with their own countries. But in the end, it is the parent’s story. I know these fears and the bargains you make with the future, the self-doubt and guilt, the adoration and the letting go. No other fiction I’ve read comes close to capturing as this book does what it means to be a parent.

I really didn’t want to read this bestseller. I had no desire to revisit the segregated South of the early 1960s, when pretty much the only job available to a woman of color was as a domestic servant. However, when my book club chose it, I gave it a try and found it to be a good read. The book flows well, moving along at a good pace. As one member of my book club said, I had no trouble turning the pages. Also, I was relieved that the book has none of the tacky slapstick I’ve seen in trailers for the film.

Returning to her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi after college without the “Mrs” degree her mother expected her to earn, Skeeter wants to be a journalist. She lands a job on the local paper writing a weekly cleaning advice column, in spite of her never having cleaned anything herself. She can’t ask the loving servant who brought her up, because Constantine has mysteriously up and quit while Skeeter was away at college, so she turns to Aibileen, her friend Elizabeth’s maid, for the requisite information. Observing the way Elizabeth and Skeeter’s other childhood friend, Hilly, treat their help, Skeeter hits on the idea of interviewing domestics to get their point of view. What she doesn’t understand is just how dangerous such confidences can be for her and for any servant daring enough to speak with her.

The story is told in chapters that alternate between Skeeter, Aibileen and Aibileen’s friend and fellow servant, Minnie, a feisty woman whose big mouth has lost her many jobs. The author differentiates the three voices well, but I appreciated each having her own chapter. A framework for these personal stories is provided by the nascent civil rights movement, which is presented (accurately, I think) as rumors from the outside world.

Recently one of my own childhood friends mentioned how lucky we were to have the love and guidance of these extra parental figures. She’s right, but of course the relationship was vastly more complicated. Even as a child I wondered who cared for our maid’s children while she fixed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us. At the same time I understood that, as my mother pointed out, we were providing jobs and financial sustenance for women who had few other options.

To her credit, Stockett uses Skeeter’s research to open up the “Mammy” myth from Gone with the Wind: the belief that servants are part of the family, loving and beloved. For instance, Aibileen talks about how when the children grow up enough to learn their parents’ prejudices, she moves on to work for another family with younger children.

However, I don’t think Stockett goes far enough. The good characters are very good, and the bad characters are awful. More inner conflict for them would make the story more realistic–not, I hasten to add, that there weren’t people who behaved as badly as the villains here, but in my experience there’s a least some redeeming feature. Also, having been a servant myself, though without the burden of racial prejudice, I would expect that love for the employer’s children would not be unmixed with other emotions. Similarly, friendship of a sort can certainly exist between employer and domestic, but when my mother declared that she and her maid were best friends, I could only shake my head at her naïveté.

These relationships are complicated. And I think Stockett could have captured more of that complexity instead of falling back on Pollyannas and happy endings. While I congratulate her for tackling the issue at all and for working so hard to capture voices from both sides, I would much rather have read a story written by a woman of color who had worked as a domestic servant and who could therefore have created more genuine characters.

I don't buy peaches in the grocery store anymore. Either they rot before getting ripe or they have no flavor. I'm lucky to have alternatives: nearby farms and farmers' markets where I can find good peaches.

This memoir opens with the shocking image of Masumoto expecting to have to bring in the bulldozers to rip out his orchard of peach trees. These healthy and productive trees produce Sun Crest peaches, an heirloom strain with amazing flavor but a short shelf life and mild color.

As suppliers constantly tell Masumoto, consumers only care about the color and markets need fruit that can be shipped long distances without spoiling. To meet this demand, nurseries compete to come up with the next flavor-of-the-month strain of fruit. This surprised me. I would expect it of peas or tomatoes or other annuals, but the time investment in fruit trees seems so great that a quick turnover to catch a market boom in the popularity of a particular strain would be impossible. It would be like a writer trying to imitate some new popular book, not realising that by the time her book is written and published, an entirely different kind of book will have captured the public's imagination.

And of course, the suppliers are wrong. At least, I think I'm not the only consumer who cares much more about flavor than color. I'd pretty much stopped eating apples because they were so bland, but now we have lots of heirloom kinds of apples available. Same thing with tomatoes. I would love to try a Sun Crest peach.

Masumoto's descriptions of farm life are lovely: blossoms in the spring, weighing a peach in your hand to determine ripeness, spreading grapes on paper trays to dry in the sun, pruning branches for the best growth. He talks a lot about the relationship between the farm and family, not just his wife and children but his parents and grandparents. He remembers and beautifully describes the way his grandmother, his baachan, walked in from the fields.

His grandparents came to the U.S. from Japan and were following the hard working emigrant path when World War II started and they, like other Japanese-Americans, were sent to detention camps. After they got out, even though they were middle-aged, they decided to save and buy their own land. Masumoto's father stayed to work the farm his parents bought, the land that the author now farms, producing peaches and raisins.

Masumoto has a lovely voice, calm and straightforward, even when describing the indignities of the camps and the way neighbors helped themselves to the belongings left behind. His attitude is both realistic, especially about the difficulties of making a family farm successful, and idealistic. He still believes that there are people out there who will want his peaches and that he can support his family, even as he describes the vagaries of the weather that can wipe out a crop of raisins in a day, and migrant workers whose unavailability can cause a disastrous delay at harvest time. Unsparing of himself, he is quick to own up to his mistakes and naïveté.

In the end, this account is a realistic depiction of life on a family farm. I've worked on a dairy farm, but cultivating trees calls for a very different relationship with time. I agonised with Masumoto over whether trees had grown too old to be productive or what path a threatening storm might take. I rejoiced with him on finding a much-needed antique defuzzer in a shed and in taking twilight walks through the vineyards with his young children. Anyone interested in locavore issues or who just wants to be immersed in a different sort of life for a while will enjoy this book.

I've learned to avoid reading the back cover and inside jacket before I've finished the book because they often give away too much of the story. Sure enough, the back cover of this book has a blurb containing a spoiler, but avoiding it didn't help me since it only took me a few chapters to recognise the classic that this story is based on. Knowing what was going to happen made me put down the book often, in spite of the excellent writing. I just didn't feel that I had the emotional stamina to take the tragedies that I knew were coming.

At one point, having been away from it for several weeks, I thought I could safely label it a did-not-finish. It looked innocent enough lying there on my bedside table, though, and eventually the beautiful prose lured me back into the story and I did finally finish it.

Edgar is the much-wanted son of Gar and Trudy, who breed and train dogs, carrying on the work of Gar's father. The dogs have come to be known simply as Sawtelle dogs and are carefully placed with people who will respect and continue the training instilled by the Sawtelles. Edgar is born deaf but learns to sign with his parents, often with signs he's adapted or made up. His companion is Almondine, a Sawtelle dog who sleeps, plays and eats with Edgar, teaching him as she teaches the puppies how to behave. As he gets older, Edgar's job is to name the new puppies, a job he takes very seriously, perusing the dictionary and matching the name to the personality. Then he begins to help with the training.

It is the training portions that fascinated me, the descriptions of the tasks they put the dogs through, and of the bond that develops between human and canine. Gar's father had an extensive correspondence with another expert who did not believe that dogs could be bred for qualities of character rather than color of coat or shape of ear yet the Sawtelle methods have clearly been successful. Gar carries on his father's meticulous breeding records.

Wroblewski's prose is arrestingly lovely even in its plainness. He says of Edgar's mother: “Working with the dogs, Trudy was at her most charismatic and imperious. Edgar had seen her cross the mow at a dead run, grab the collar of a dog who refused to down, and bring it to the floor, all in a single balletic arc. Even the dog had been impressed: it capered and spun and licked her face as though she had performed a miracle on its behalf.”

He also captures Edgar's mindset at each age, from early childhood into his teens, affected by his isolated life on the farm in northern Wisconsin. Describing the day Edgar and his father discover a stray, Wroblewski says that Edgar stops “near the narrow grove of trees that projected into the south field atop the hill. A granite ledge swelled from the ground there, gray and narrow and barnacled with moss, cresting among the trees and submerging near the road like the hump of a whale breaking the surface of the earth. As his father walked along, Edgar stepped into the wild mustard and Johnson grass and waited to see if the ground might ripple and seal over as the thing passed. Instead, a shadow floated into view at the ledge's far end. Then the shadow became a dog, nose lowered to the mossy back of the leviathan as though scenting an old trail. When the dog reached the crest of the rock, it looked up, forepaw alert, and froze.”

There is much in this book about domestication and the wild, compromise and danger. I'm glad I read on. By the time I reached the end, I was ready for it. And I would not for anything have missed the man Edgar meets on his travels.

A particularly challenging aspect of the writing craft is to braid a storyline set in the present with one set in the past. Full Dark House starts in the present day when recently retired detective Gladys Forthright is awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call saying that a bomb has destroyed her former station house. She rushes to the scene where she is met by her long-term colleague John May. Knowing that his partner Arthur Bryant planned to work there all night, May fears the worst.

Certain clues indicate that the explosion is related to the very first case that May worked on with Bryant, when May first joined the Peculiar Crimes Unit—peculiar meaning “special” but given Bryant's interest in the paranormal it quickly came to mean something entirely different. That first day Bryant and May began investigating the gruesome murder of a dancer during World War II. The dancer was preparing to perform in a new production of Orpheus at the Palace Theatre, which was meant to raise the morale of Londoners buffeted by wartime shortages and the constant threat of German bombing raids.

The easiest approach to combining past and present is to have the present-day story as a frame: only at the beginning and the end of the book. Brideshead Revisited is an excellent example. Another approach is to introduce each chapter with a bit of the present-day story and then move back into the past, as Jane Urquhart did so well in Away. A third way is to alternate chapters, which Fowler does here effectively.

The main thing is to be sure the reader knows what time period she is in, so having a consistent format, such as the three above, helps by telling the reader what to expect. Recently I heard of a work-in-progress, a novel, set entirely in today except for one flashback scene near the middle. While I believe a talented writer can make anything work, I suspect that scene will leave readers disoriented.

Another way to help readers figure out where they are, as I learned from my friend Pat, is to provide clues in the text that signal one time frame or another. Fowler does that as well. In the present, May complains about his elderly aches and pains, while in the past he's sprightly enough at nineteen to jump on a motorcycle and endure a grueling pursuit. Also, Bryant's presence is a clear marker that we are in the past. The time periods, too, are quite different: the present prompts May's complaints about traffic and ugly architecture, while the past conjures up the blackouts and sirens of the Blitz. Also, some characters only exist in one timeframe or the other.

In addition to managing the time shifts so that I was never unsure of what time period we were in, Fowler crafts a satisfying puzzle, both in the past and the present. Bryant and May make an interesting team. May knows how to attract the ladies while Bryant hopelessly fumbles every encounter. Bryant's partiality to paranormal explanations is lost on May with his resolute practicality. When the Palace appears to be haunted by a phantom, the two come up with dramatically different explanations. If I anticipated some aspects of the ending, others took me by surprise. This is the first in a series of books about Bryant and May, and it is well done indeed.

In writing last week about Octavian Nothing I mentioned my nostalgia for the time when I equated the U.S. with liberty and believed this country stood as a shining model of freedom for the world to emulate. That book explores the hypocrisy of the founding fathers demanding freedom for themselves while owning slaves. Lest we think such abuses happen only in the distant past, Dave Eggers comes along with this nonfiction book to remind us that they are all too current.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun (pronounced ZAY-toon) and his wife Kathy run a flourishing, if demanding, contracting business in New Orleans. Anyone who has owned a home knows that a contractor who shows up when he says he will and does good work is more valuable than gold. Zeitoun's customers trust him. When he works on one house, soon he has crews working on other houses on the street.

Born in Syria, Zeitoun becomes an American, proud to contribute to his community. Kathy grew up in Baton Rouge and converted to Islam before she met Zeitoun. The two are a responsible, hard-working couple with two daughters, well-known and respected in their community.

Then comes Hurricane Katrina. Zeitoun persuades Kathy to leave with the children, but stays behind himself to watch over their properties. Also, many current and former customers have entrusted him with their keys to keep an eye on their properties too. In the aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans fills up with guns and law enforcement personnel, the few professionals supplemented by contractors from companies like Blackwater. One of their first actions is to construct an emergency prison similar to the one in Guantanamo Bay.

Eggers tells the story of the Zeitouns in straight-forward prose, engrossing and alarming in its simplicity. Such a story—unbelievable to someone who hasn't seen her middle-eastern friend repeatedly told with a straight face that the men's room is out of order—needs no embellishment. Its very plainness is its strength. The lack of adjectives and adverbs, of metaphors and complex phrases, reflects the baffled shock of the Zeitouns at their treatment. Faced with such abuse, abuse that goes against everything you think you know about a country, your mind stutters to a halt. You go back to the basics, aware only of your immediate experience, absent the comforting context your mind normally wraps around events.

While the book is shocking, the closeness of the bond between Zeitoun and Kathy and with their friends and family reassures me that hope remains. Social psychologists have long known that people will pull together when faced with a common enemy. Positive use may be made of this principle, such as by Churchill during the Blitz. But more commonly, bullies and oligarchs use it to muster followers, whether it is Hitler blaming the Jews for Germany's problems, or right-wing politicians demonising poor people or unions.

I hate to see Muslims, the vast majority of whom I'm sure are peace-loving, hard-working members of their communities, tarred with the brush of a small number of terrorists. Eggers offers an alternative narrative. I hope many people in the U.S. read this book.

There's a song that Alistair Brown sings that always moves me. In Jamestown the ship's crew sing of “the wild delight of a sailor homeward bound” after being at sea for three years. They urge each other on, anticipating their welcome. But the line that makes me catch my breath is when they arrive and friends and family crowd around saying, “Welcome, Columbia's mariners, to your home and liberty.”

We're talking about a time long ago when the country was young and wooden ships sailed the oceans, so the equating of the United States with liberty has the naive freshness of the days when the country stood as a beacon of freedom. However, the simple pride I felt in my country as a child has long been undercut by the realisation that those same founding fathers who bewailed the tyranny of England were themselves slave owners. Liberty, of course, was only for white men.

This Young Adult book was first recommended to me by Lesley, a children's librarian. Since then, others have mentioned how good it is. I found it a little hard to get into, since the language is archaic and the opening situation unclear. For many chapters, I was uncertain of the time period, and whether I was reading a fantasy novel or a depiction of the real world. Even knowing as much as I do of the eighteenth century craze for natural science and the odd enclaves of amateur enthusiasts, I was confused. The explanation was a long time coming and only the short chapters and faith in Lesley's judgment kept me reading.

Set in Boston in the 1760s, Octavian lives with his mother in a house dedicated to the pursuit of science. The amateur philosopher-scientists of the Novanglian College, led by Mr. Gitney, pursue many odd experiments and also tutor Octavian who is treated like a little prince. After all, his mother was a princess in Africa. Dressed in silks and satins and petted by all, he is given a classical education and music lessons. It is some time before he realises that other little boys, whether prince or urchin, do not have to measure and weigh their excrement to compare intake and output. Eventually he becomes aware that he and his mother are themselves are not only slaves, but also the subjects of experiments to prove the inferiority of the African race.

Anderson says in the endnote that he wanted to write about this seminal period in history from the point of view of someone who doesn't know how it will turn out. I find that idea fascinating. Caught up in a moment of cultural change, as I remember quite well from 1968, you can sense possibilities opening up that you never dreamed of, even as you fear that what you're experiencing is just a momentary blip. How much more interesting, then, to look at this historic moment from the point of view of an outsider.

I'm surprised that the book is considered appropriate for teens and impressed that it is so popular. The language, which is similar to that of other eighteenth century novels, is difficult and unwelcoming. The vivid descriptions of abuses visited upon slaves cannot but horrify the reader. I knew that YA books had become much darker and more graphic that those of my day, but this is the stuff of nightmares. However, then I recalled that when I was eleven, I came across a book that consisted of news stories about lynchings, just one reprint after another. It was a thick book. Yes, I was horrified. Nightmares ensued. Yet with the devotion to fairness that the young possess, I became a foot soldier in the cause. It was very much due to this formative moment that I later broke with my parents over the civil rights movement.

If it takes this book a while to get going, it does eventually become absorbing, especially as the narrator grows older and understands better what is happening around him. It is a shocking book, but one that is ultimately satisfying. I will look for the next in the series and think of Octavian when I listen the sailors of the Jamestown extolling home and liberty.

The other day I walked past the house where we lived until I was five and was surprised all over again. No matter how many times I've visited it as an adult, I always forget that it is green now, not the white I remember. And the back yard that stretched an unimaginable distance now seems no more than a patch of grass with a few bushes around the edges. Even the tree that once held the bees that stung all of us during a memorable picnic lunch is gone. I remember my mother hanging sheets in that yard and how I dodged between the damp fluttering walls that made up an interminable maze. This afterthought of a yard could hardly have contained such imaginings. Could I be mistaken? Perhaps I turned down the wrong street. Perhaps my childhood never happened that way.

I experience the same trepidation when I reread books I loved when young. Bradbury met some critical need in my teenaged heart, his stories full of the ache and longing that swamped me. If the emotions were sometimes over the top, well, I knew all about that. Many of his images became part of my personal iconography: carnivals and October nights, Ohio fireflies, and lightning rods with curious markings. And, inevitably, the Mars as he imagines it to be before the men from Earth arrive.

I was afraid, coming to this book decades after my last reading, that I would find it too childish in its language, too obvious in its satire, too unrestrained in its passions. But I did not. It may be all of those things, but I did not notice, caught up as I was in the world of Bradbury's imagining. Even the smell of the pages brought back memories of another cold spring.

The story which affected me most deeply back then was the one about Spender, a member of the Fourth Expedition who found on Mars a civilisation he admired and wanted to preserve from the incursions of the loud and violent Earthmen. I finished Spender's story sitting in the back row of my English class, the paperback hidden in my grammar text. Nostalgia for a lost civilisation, a past preferable to our present, overwhelmed me and I was so moved that tears ran down my face and blotched my uniform, startling the teacher who wondered what tragedy lurked in diagramming sentences. A few years later, reading Tolkein, I found the same nostalgia, the same shimmer of the past (as Tolkein called it) adding depth to the present.

Reading it now I did not cry, but I was still moved. What most surprised me, though, was that Bradbury, writing this book that was first published in 1950, set his far-distant future in what is now for me the recent past: 1999-2005, though the last few stories take place in 2026. I found it disconcerting to think that Spender made his stand in 2001, a year I recall as devoid of manned expeditions to Mars.

Also disconcerting, and of course always a danger when predicting the future, is how far off some of Bradbury's predictions are. Not just the lack of regular taxi shuttles to the red planet, but the idea that by 2005 the Moral Climates people would have banned all literature except for the most realistic and unimaginative. Poe, the Grimm brothers, Lewis Carroll, any books deemed escapist—“All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy“—are destroyed, and filmmakers are only allowed to make versions of Hemingway stories. The idea is laughable now when the entertainment juggernaut seems unstoppable.

But then I recalled the attempts to ban the Harry Potter books for being about magic. Bradbury recognised the Puritan streak in American culture, the intrusive, I'm-going-to-decide-what's-best-for-you attitude that has become only too familiar. In contrast, his books open the mind. They are certainly worthy of being pulled off the shelf for another read.

You may not be able to go back to your childhood, but you can bring the past into today. All week I have been conscious of the shadow of my younger self, of how my life now would appear to her. It's more than a different point of view; it's a stretch that exercises an imagination grown lazy.

I ended up reading this collection four times. The first time I just enjoyed the words, the sound of them, the flow. I ignored that nagging, rational part of my mind that is always demanding to know what things mean. I just shut it up in a closet and let it rattle around and fuss while I let the words slip through my thoughts.

Lonely whitecap limpet, days are not true. You stand on one foot,

and we brush past. To live a life is not to walk across a field.

The second time I read for images, lingering over each poem and letting resonances collect in the space between them. Some images move seamlessly into the next, while others leave gaps, crevasses for the imagination to fill.

Above her

a hummingbird pivots, unsure.

Inside the girl a field of reeds, a year of hinges,

her father's boat crossing the wide water.

For the third reading I let the demanding creature out of the closet and read for meaning. The book is in two parts. The first is about a young family in an isolated town in the Pacific Northwest, about the writer learning and imagining about this family. As in a fairy tale, this family has the first child born in the town in a century, but their second child is stillborn. Precise sensual images anchor the way grief dismantles the small family.

A dictionary of smells. The kitchen of the year she'd left, scrub pines,

sassafras from the schoolyard and mossy tennis courts.

The second part takes the authors personal experiences of pregnancy, birth, work, marriage—all those essentials of life. Some of the poems are acrostics, and many have allusions to children's books and fairy tales, unsurprising fare for a new parent. The imagery here is less dense, occasionally playful. Still, even the lightest poems are informed by the images and emotions of the earlier section, the threat of loss, the awareness of just how tenuous a construct this family life can be.

The first person in recorded history

struck by a comet slept on her couch

across the road from the Comet Drive-In

The fashion these days, or so I'm told, is to construct poetry chapbooks and collections as narratives, so that the entire group falls within a single story arc. I prefer the tension that Snyder-Camp creates, where each poem stands alone, but takes on new meaning within the context of the other poems in the book.

I let everything go for my fourth reading, allowing words, images, meaning to merge into an extraordinary experience. I've found Tupelo Press to be a reliable source of outstanding poetry, and this book is no exception. I highly recommend it.

I thought about Diane Arbus as I read this book. Arbus’s work forces me to look at and pay attention to people I might otherwise avoid, my eyes sliding away, consigning them to the crowd. Having to recognise the subject as an individual is unsettling and sometimes unpleasant, but ultimately edifying as it compels me to acknowledge the person’s humanity and appreciate his or her difficulties and concerns.

Oates’s work affects me the same way. Here, she has taken the JonBenet Ramsey case as a springboard for exploring the dynamics of a family caught up in a similar maelstrom: a personal tragedy turned into a media circus. Normally I avoid such distractions, preferring not to waste my time on the viral coverage of some self-indulgent celebrity heading to rehab or some non-public figure jockeying for fame, so I didn’t follow the Ramsey case. But Oates is too good a writer to let me off the hook.

Now 19, Skylar Rampike narrates the events around the death of his younger sister almost ten years earlier. At six, little Bliss Rampike—born Edna Louise Rampike—is already an ice skating prodigy with several local titles on her resume and a promising future, when she is found murdered in the furnace room of the family home in a prosperous New Jersey suburb. Although a convicted pedophile confesses to the killing, Skylar himself is widely suspected of being the culprit.

Skylar does not spare himself. He was an unattractive child, with fly-away fawn-colored hair, and an even more unattractive adolescent. In his desperation to please his demanding parents, Skylar injures himself in a gymnastics class, leaving him with a permanent limp and a tendency to wear what his parents criticise as “his pain face”.

I would like to think that Betsey and Bix are parodies of awful parents. Betsey’s obsession with Bliss’s career is rooted in her own frustrated dreams of glory. Although an outline description of Betsey’s actions would sound like the stereotype of the worst of stage mothers, or the recently celebrated Tiger Mom, Oates fills in this image with emotion and self-deception. Bix may be idolised by his young children, but he cannot be trusted, reneging on promise after promise to his son and daughter, even as he swears that they are what matter most to him. Behind Bix’s bluster, too, are shadows of uncertainty and baffled regret, as he consistently mispronounces clichés and foreign tags.

Betsey and Bix are not parodies, unfortunately, in spite of some reviewers' complaints that they are not sufficiently complex. Too many parents believe they can lie to children and control their futures without repercussions. Such parents don’t see their children as independent beings with their own hopes and fears and dreams, but rather as extensions of themselves. Their tragedy, then, is when these parents find that the love and devotion they assumed was theirs by right is not, in fact, forthcoming.

Skylar’s voice as narrator is perfectly pitched as a small child describing outings with his mummy and daddy, as an awkward pre-teen at boarding school experiencing friendship and romance for the first time, and as a thoroughly alienated adolescent. This is Skylar’s story and it has to do with what connection such a damaged soul can find in our fractured and selfish world.