Center of Everything (Moriarty) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Laura Moriarty's debut novel has the makings of something wearily familiar: the Midwestern mother-daughter coming-of-age story, featuring at least one episode in which Mom leaves home looking like a movie star but winds up collapsing in tears. Happily, Ms. Moriarty's artful, enveloping book is a lot more interesting than its genre initially suggests. It traces not only stormy adolescence, but also the essential stages of Evelyn's moral and intellectual evolution.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


It's not easy to build a novel around a personality, but Moriarty does it well.
Anne Stephenson - USA Today


Lively and endearing… complete tour of…conflicts between mother and daughter, as well as between the narrator's hopes and dreams.
Denver Post & Rocky Mountian News


Teriffic…. Moriarty has steady confidence…expertly wringing poignancy from…young lives…. A deeply satisfying novel
San Diego Union Tribune


For 10-year-old Evelyn Bucknow, there really is no place like home. On all the world maps she's ever seen, the United States has been smack dab in the middle, with Kansas in the middle of that. "I feel so lucky to live here, right in the center," she proclaims, in Moriarty's wonderfully down-to-earth debut. Dazzled by visions of Ronald Reagan on the television, the twinkle in his eye and his contention that "God put America between two oceans on purpose," Evelyn's youthful optimism is shaken by her young single mother Tina's inability to take control of her life. As Tina falls for her married boss, who gives her a car (his contribution to the trickle-down theory) but leaves her pregnant and shattered, Evelyn grows closer to her neighbor, a curly-haired scamp named Travis (who has eyes only for Evelyn's stunning friend, Deena) and her Bible-thumping grandmother, a regular listener to Jerry Falwell's radio show. As a teenager, she is influenced by a couple of liberal-minded teachers, one an emigre from New York and the other an introverted biology instructor intent on teaching evolution, but she never cuts her family ties. With renewed faith in her scatterbrained but endearing mother and with college on the horizon, she begins to find her place in the social and political spectrum and to appreciate the vastness of a world that just might extend beyond the Sunflower State. Moriarty deftly treads the line between adolescence and adulthood, and insecurity and self-assurance, offering a moving portrait of life in blue-collar middle America.
Publishers Weekly


Evelyn Bucknow's world has been quite small up till now. She and her mother live in Treeline Colonies, a collection of cramped apartments teetering on the edge of a highway in the middle of Kansas. Her grandmother visits every week, smelling of cigarettes and bearing gifts, including stories about God and Wichita, where she lives with her husband, the grandfather Evelyn has never met and the father her mother no longer speaks to. But she is getting older, and luckily she takes the reader along as she enters a widening world of new friends, cruel enemies, fresh pain, and Travis Rowley, "thief, breaker of locks, my own dark avenger and first true love." This world is a place of hard knocks and little self-pity, especially for the charming and prescient Evelyn. Moriarty builds an addictive and moving portrait of this poor, Midwestern girl in the Eighties, reminiscent of Dolores in Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, so well realized that one forgets it is fiction and so infectious that one never wants to put it down, even after turning to the last page. Essential for fiction collections. —Rachel Collins
Library Journal


(Adult/High School) Evelyn Bucknow, 10 years old at the start of this novel, lives with her single mother. Struggling to make ends meet, Tina is a loving, if sometimes absentminded, parent. Won over by the seemingly kind attention of her married boss, she has an affair that leaves her pregnant and in dire financial straits when she is fired from her job. Evelyn narrates the story, and readers witness her growing maturity in the face of circumstances that are beyond her control. With dawning awareness and increasing resentment, she sees that her mother's poor choices are creating havoc in their lives. Evelyn is determined to avoid the same mistakes and use her intelligence to get out of the cycle of poverty that is so much a part of her youth. YAs will enjoy this engrossing novel and connect to the authentic and changing voice Moriarity gives Evelyn as she grows into adulthood. Her thoughts and feelings ring true to the angst and insecurity that are often associated with adolescence. Readers, along with the protagonist, feel sympathy and understanding for human failings. —Julie Dasso, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
School Library Journal


A pleasantly wry, spunky debut, set in the Reagan era, about a fatherless girl who uses her brains as the way out of her mother's hopeless welfare state. Ten-year-old Evelyn Bucknow, plain but brainy, has learned something about the inequities of the world from her less-than-privileged, conservative vantage point in Kerrville, Kansas. Her Vietnam vet grandfather has disowned Evelyn's mother, Tina, for her early sins and still considers her a "whore." Evelyn's grandmother, Eileen, is an Evangelical Reaganite who doesn't believe Tina will make it to heaven. And Evelyn's own fourth-grade classmates rub in her state of impecunious fatherlessness. Yet Evelyn is at the top of her class, winning the science prize over the town's rich girl because our heroine plays by the rules. And even when her first love and neighbor, handsome kleptomaniac Travis Rowley, falls ungratefully for Evelyn's beautiful new friend Deena, Evelyn resists the entrapments of failure that the welfare state seems to expect of her. Much as in another recent storyteller clashing with a dim-bulbed mom (Stephanie Rosenfeld's Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu, p. 638), Evelyn finds her wits sharpened by adversity and by her mother's ill planning-in this case, her getting pregnant by a kind but married boss, who skips town. Still, when it seems the new baby's retardation is the demonstration of God's just deserts, Evelyn finds strength—and Moriarty pumps literary vigor into her narrative—by reversing a reader's expectations. Evelyn's voice is a lone, steely cry against the chorus of small-town righteousness for which President Reagan's TV speeches form the background noise. And while Moriarty is no fancy prose stylist, shelistens carefully to the speech of her characters, and Evelyn and Tina's voices, especially, ring true without sounding dopey or sentimental. Among the plethora of first novels tracking preteen daughters of sorry single mothers, Moriarty's gutsy opener is hard not to like.
Kirkus Reviews