|
The title of Laura Moriarty's impressive debut novel THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING refers to the story's Kansas setting: "If you look at a map of the world, the United States is usually right in the middle, and Kansas is in the middle of that. So right here where we are, maybe this very stretch of highway we are driving on, is the exact center of the whole world, what everything else spirals out from." The title, however, could just as easily apply to its young narrator, Evelyn. So often, Evelyn is the calm heart at the center of the crazy events swirling around her, quietly observing and commenting on everything that happens but rarely sucked into these everyday dramas.
Evelyn is 10 at the novel's opening. Gifted at school but still quite naive about the world, Evelyn often records innocent observations that are unintentionally funny. Down-to-earth Evelyn is particularly bewildered by her scatterbrained and childlike mother, Tina. Estranged from her father and unable to hold down a job, Tina often seems less grown up than her serious-minded daughter. When Tina's failed affair with her married boss results in a pregnancy, Tina balances on the verge of depression, particularly when the baby turns out to be severely retarded. Against the backdrop of Tina's crises, Evelyn is quietly struggling with her own day-to-day trials, from competing in the state science fair to envying the other girls' Ocean Pacific sweatshirts and designer jeans when Tina can't even provide Evelyn with shoes that fit.
Throughout the novel, Evelyn secretly adores Travis, the bad-boy-next-door at her run-down apartment complex. But when Travis falls hard for Evelyn's beautiful best friend, Deena, Evelyn must repress her desires even as she watches Travis and Deena head toward a very different fate from the one that awaits her. As Evelyn matures, she struggles to define herself apart from her family and her secret crush. Lacking guidance from her mother and encouraged by her grandmother, Evelyn becomes active in a local evangelical Christian church.
As she grows older, though, her increasing interest in science --- particularly biology --- clashes with her religious beliefs when a conflict over teaching evolution threatens to tear her small town apart. Mentored by two idealistic, outsider teachers, Evelyn quietly excels at school and, as she graduates from high school at the novel's end, begins to envision a life outside her small Kansas town.
Not coincidentally, the eight years that THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING spans are also the eight years of the Reagan administration. The novel brilliantly brings the 1980s to life, not only through carefully placed pop culture references but also through subtle commentaries on the era's politics. When Tina is forced to go on welfare, young Evelyn is mortified by the thought of her mother joining the rank of "welfare queens." When two older teens offer her marijuana, Nancy Reagan's advice to "Just Say No" resounds in Evelyn's mind. Many of the key economic, political, and social dilemmas of the Reagan era are dramatized here in clever but thought-provoking ways.
THE CENTER OF EVERYTHING is a coming-of-age novel, family drama, and political commentary rolled into one. It would be a perfect book club choice, particularly for a mother-daughter book club, and with its carefully drawn adolescent narrator, it will appeal to teens as well as to their parents.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
© Copyright 1996-2010, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
