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Young Theresa is the middle class Irish and strikingly beautiful babysitter to the rich and famous of Long Island's East End. She spends her fifteenth summer caring for "four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight-year-old- cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist." Theresa still lives in the world of children, weaving stories about lollipop trees and bedazzled shoes and spending her days at the beach. However, by the end of the summer, as illness, death and betrayal have obliquely asserted themselves, Theresa has become an adult. It is from this vantage of loss that our older narrator tells the dense story of one June to August.
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
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